Empowering Women in Entrepreneurship

In this episode…

Nic Cary interviews Sharmadean and they discuss the lessons learned during her career journey including:

• The power of community and networking is essential for driving business growth and success.
• The need for continuous innovation and adaptation is crucial in staying ahead in a competitive industry.
• The importance of gender equity and creating supportive environments for women in the workplace is vital for achieving long-term impact.

Sponsor for this episode:

This episode is brought to you by Sky’s The Limit, one of the largest nonprofit programs for underrepresented young adult entrepreneurs in the US. Sky’s The Limit is a quick-growing digital platform that connects entrepreneurs with their peers, volunteer business mentors, training resources, and funding.

Our goal is to develop the social capital that founders need to chase their business dreams.

To learn more, please visit www.skysthelimit.org today.

Episode transcript

INTRO (00:04):

Welcome to The First Buck Podcast, where we feature stories about entrepreneurs and the people who support them. Now let's get started with the show.

Nic Cary (00:26):

Hello and welcome to The First Buck Podcast, brought to you by skysthelimit.org. We feature stories about entrepreneurs and the people who support them. Today we're joined by Sharmadean Reid, MBE, that stands for Member of the British Empire, the Founder and CEO of the Stack World, a platform to empower women's networks and communities. Now, while studying, Sharmadean founded the award-winning WAH Nails, which completely changed the beauty landscape with its innovative salon space. After over a decade of meeting thousands of women from all over the world, she launched the Stack World. Her mission is gender equity through community providing consultancy and software for businesses that want to keep their women employees engaged. Her work supporting women earn Sharmadean the Clicquot. That's a famous champagne brand, Bold Future Award in 2021. So Sharmadean, we are super excited to talk with you today. We have a little tradition around here. We always like to learn. How did you earn your first pound dollar or euro? I'm guessing it was maybe a pound.

Sharmadean Reid (01:26):

Yes. My first pound was earned by making fun little badges at school. So I would draw on a piece of paper, some cute illustration, or I would illustrate somebody's name in a nice font, and then I would put Cellar tape over the front of it, and then on the back I would put a safety pin and then they had a badge, and I would sell them for pennies really. But I definitely would've sold enough to have earned a pound.

Nic Cary (01:59):

I love that. Okay, cool. So basically personalized almost stickers or badges. Now, were you in Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw, or which of the houses were you in?

Sharmadean Reid (02:10):

Nic, I'm 40 years old. By the time Harry Potter came out, I was like, well beyond that, I was watching Sex in the City. I wasn't reading Harry Potter. Wait, wait, wait. Hufflepuff, is that Pokemon? Did I get that wrong?

Nic Cary (02:27):

No, you've got it right. Same age as you. So I got into it afterwards. I always love that they had their badges.

Sharmadean Reid (02:34):

I just think anything that was, I was never into things like that. I was never really into Pokemon or Harry Potter or any of those things. I was always looking at adult content, like movies, film, tv. Straight away I was watching sitcoms and series because they were really inspirational role models for my entrepreneurship journey. Actually, I loved watching The Bold and the Beautiful and Dynasty, Oprah and all of these super glamorous women who are out in the working world. That's what I was watching when I was a young person.

Nic Cary (03:09):

I love hearing about that. It is one of the things we learned at Sky's the Limit when we surveyed our entrepreneurship community. The two reasons why a lot of entrepreneurs didn't feel like they could pursue entrepreneurship were a lack of know-how and a lack of role models. So we're going to spend a little more time talking about role models and especially ones that have been important to you. But before we get there, so from making little badges and selling those to your friends, tell us a little bit about your professional career, how you sort of ended up pursuing entrepreneurship and maybe some of the steps along the way where you sort of grew into those responsibilities and what you learned at each stage.

Sharmadean Reid (03:47):

So when I was 12 years old, I knew I wanted to move to London and work in the creative industries. I'd always had this very clear vision for my life, which was being involved in teams of people doing fashion shoots or films. And I took every step from age 12 to 19 to get myself to college in order to get there. So I studied at Central St. Martins in London, which is kind of like Parsons or RISD or something like that. And in this university, I'd been so overly prepared for it. I've been prepared since I was 12, but by the time I got to university, I wasn't that engaged. So with all of my free time, I would go and intern and I would intern for all of the fashion designers, and everyone I thought was interesting in the industry, I would be interning for them.

(04:47):

From there, I started to get a reputation as someone who was highly organized, super professional, and had an energy. I can't overstate enough how when you are young, the energy you bring in the room is what people notice about you first and foremost. So I always wanted to maintain this peppy, can-do happy energy, because I knew that being on set or being in the working environment was quite stressful If you had a lot of responsibility and hey, I was an intern, I didn't really have any. So let me bring the fun and the bikes. That meant that when I graduated, I'd already built up quite a large roster of contacts in the industry just because I'd been working for the whole duration of my degree. So when I graduated, the first opportunity that I was given was for Nike. That was an incredible opportunity. They said to me, we want you. So imagine I'm 23. They were like, would you go to Milan, be paid a lot of money to put clothes on all of these cool people and then go for dinner with them and hang out? And I was like, yes, please

Nic Cary (06:04):

Feel like I can get paid for this. This is fantastic.

Sharmadean Reid (06:08):

Seriously. I was like, yes, please. So that was the first step for me beginning to learn the relationship between creativity and commercial. What does it mean to work with a brand like Nike? I learned so much from them as an organization, how do you maintain innovation and creativity while also making good business sense? So from there, I'd always had these little ideas for things. I've always been the starter of things or the founder of things when I just one year later, so Nike, sorry, let me backtrack. Nike flew me around the world to do that over and over again. And I noticed through traveling that in Asia there were these incredible nail salons. And also in LA there were incredible, now salons in London and in Europe, we didn't have anything like that. It sounds crazy because now there's amazing nail salons everywhere, but we didn't have that.

(07:10):

So one year later I came back to London and I thought, I'm going to open the coolest nail salon ever, and it's going to be for me and my friends, and it's going to be a bit of a mix of streetwear and high fashion, which reflected our style, and I'm going to call it One Nails, which was named after a magazine that I'd made while I was still at university. So that was my first foray into entrepreneurship. But I would say that I was actually an accidental entrepreneur because I didn't anticipate that this would be a business. I just thought I was going to open a shop for me and my friends. I was still so young and so naive, and after six months I thought, oh, crikey, what am I doing? This is really popular and a big deal starting

Nic Cary (08:01):

Into a serious thing.

Sharmadean Reid (08:03):

That's how I got started in business.

Nic Cary (08:06):

Wow. I don't think I've ever heard this story from you, but it's so emblematic of an important lesson that entrepreneurs need to think about, which is how do you find that market opportunity, that thing that didn't exist, and then bringing it and sort of opening up people's perspective rise to something they didn't know they might want, which is a high-end nail salon experience that was working in other places. It just didn't exist in London yet. So that's cool. But I

Sharmadean Reid (08:34):

Think market, sorry. I think market opportunity. So I might defy the normal version of this podcast, Nic, because I came from an art and creative background, and as much as I love business, I think so much of success has been based on intuition and creativity. I have never done market research. I just don't operate like that. I don't think, huh, where can I make money right now? I don't believe that. The way that my mind works when it comes to devising new opportunities or new ideas is I think what do me and my friends want right now? And I'm lucky because me and my friends happen to be global taste makers. So if we like it, then we are anticipating that lots of people will like it, and I really build for me and my community, and if it takes off and other people like it, then fantastic.

(09:44):

Let's say that I opened my now salon and it didn't become this kind of global phenomenon. Let's say I opened it and it was just a normal salon ticking along that would also have been satisfactory for me. Do you get what I'm saying? It's not like I'm like, oh, how can I do this? I also think that a big part of my idea generation, and this is something I advise all young entrepreneurs, is I create these two circles in a Venn diagram. So you create two circles and there's an overlapping part, and in the overlapping part is where the newness and the innovation is. So for example, circle one had nail salons in it. Circle two had art and streetwear and fashion and community in it, and I just overlapped those. So the type of salon that I built didn't really exist anywhere in the world as far as I could see on the internet. It was like a salon made by 20 somethings, four 20, somethings very millennial, very nineties inspired, very streetwear inspired. And it was the combination of all of the different things that I'm interested overlapping, which is where I think new innovation is. So right now, when I develop new ideas, I think how can I take something that is human and community-based, but push it forward in an elevated aesthetic?

Nic Cary (11:20):

There's so much interesting wisdom in there from sort of pursuing your intuition to leaning on the importance of creativity and trendsetting. I love that. And also, I mean you're an expert at this, but if you can build a powerful community, there are so many advantages that come with that. And it's not just the commercial stuff, it's people supporting each other as people being allies with each other. It's much more the idea sharing things like that. So I'd actually love to maybe hear a bit about early founding of the Stack world. So you learn a bit about building your first business with the nail salon. What happens next?

Sharmadean Reid (12:02):

So early community is something that I always find really interesting because your very early community should be the co-creators of your brand with you from the minute you have the idea. And I'm a big advocate for always talking about your idea before you've even started it in order to gauge the reaction about whether this is a good idea or not. So a lot of young founders, they feel that they need to keep their cards close to their chest. There's a lot of fear of someone's going to steal my idea or someone's going to do it before me. It doesn't matter because it's not just about the ideas, it's always about the execution, the business model, the distribution. There are all these different factors about why a business is successful and a business. So when I have an idea and my friends get so irritated with this after a while because I'm just constantly telling them new ideas, I will tell all my friends all the time, I'll tell them at a dinner party.

(13:03):

I'll tell them when I meet them for coffee, I'll tell them, because what I'm doing is I'm looking at their reaction. I'm looking at are their eyes widening? Are they leaning in? Are they excited? Do they say, I've got this exact problem. Let me tell you all about it. And then you are listening to them. They're actually giving you free insights and focus group information. So I start seeding the idea of what I'm working on before I start working on it in order to understand is this a good idea? And sometimes you can be very precious about your idea and 10 people tell you, oh, I don't like that, and you feel I'm still going to carry on doing it. You see those people on Dragons Den. I see some pictures on Dragons Den, and I'm like, at some point, why didn't this person's friend tell them this is not a good idea?

(13:55):

And then those people are, they're your early adopters. You take them on the journey with you, you update them, you start a newsletter, you invite them to a dinner party, you ask them for feedback, and your community starts building from there. So for me, with the Stack world, we'd actually created the Stack World as a pandemic pivot from Beauty Stack, which was a beauty booking software we made, which we couldn't operate during the pandemic. So I'd had the bubblings of an early community, which was made up from all of my followers and fans from my nail salon, who'd then come to the beauty software. And it was a wide range of women who are really interested in being mission driven, empowerment business, but also other things like charity or politics, just how they can help shape the world that they live in. And I started to think if women want to help shape the world they live in, but they don't see media which truly represents them, what would it look like if there was a media platform? And again, going back to this Venn diagram that was half business media and actually half women and lifestyle and role modeling. What is the stepping stone between reading Vogue Magazine and reading the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal? What is that publication and why doesn't it exist and can we create it? And that's how the stack world was born.

Nic Cary (15:36):

Okay. Alright. I want to go into some more there. One of the things you said that's interesting that I think can be a trap for entrepreneurs, and I'd love to hear your perspective on this. So I can do no wrong in my mom's eyes. So if I tell her I want to go start, I don't know, ice cream truck business, she'd probably tell me that's a great idea and she would support me and sometimes friends and family through mostly out of interest in being supportive. They're not going to give you necessarily critical feedback or they may give you false impressions about how widely adoptable an idea or something is. How do you recommend navigating that? It seems like you do an exceptionally good job of forging these early communities where you get that inspiration, where you're sort of getting taught from them whether your ideas are connecting and whether there's something there. So if you could dig into that a little bit because it's something I've seen go wrong for people where they basically have too close of a group of people to get the right kind of feedback about their business idea from,

Sharmadean Reid (16:44):

They call it the mom test. If your mom or grandma can understand it, then it's a viable business idea. I'm a big believer in going to the person who you want to sell to. So if the mom community is your customer and is your audience, then by all means ask your mom or someone else's mom or all moms the questions about your business. But for example, if I was building a lipstick brand, I wouldn't necessarily go to my brother and his friends for feedback on my lipstick brand business. They're not going to be the early customers, the early adopters, the early advocates. I wouldn't go to my friend who never wears makeup to ask them for feedback on my lipstick brand. So I think when it comes to early feedback, it pays to move towards the people who you think will be your first customer. And if they are not within your network, then go on social media, go on the internet, go in chat rooms, on message boards, and kind of start building a customer persona and a profile of who you want to sell to and then speak to them and understand what they want from your business.

Nic Cary (18:06):

All right. That's really, really wise, which is to find the people you ultimately want to be selling to. And in my case, I probably wouldn't just be selling to my mom, so I'd have to talk to some other people. Okay, cool. So one of the things I also see entrepreneurs end up in a bit of a trap with, and I wonder what your perspective is on this. We're always seeing these sort of celebrated big financings and a few people on mainstream media, but most entrepreneurship doesn't really look like that. It's smaller and medium sized businesses, it's early stage ones, but they actually are the backbone of our economy and they're totally valuable and sustainable businesses and strategically relevant and important to the economy. So one of the things I was curious about, a lot of entrepreneurs think they need to raise a lot of money or get a loan to get their business off the ground. And what advice would you have for early stage entrepreneurs? What should they be concentrating on?

Sharmadean Reid (19:02):

I think in order to understand the level of financing or the type of financing that you need for your business, it's really about firstly reflecting inward on the way you want to build business and the type of business you want to build. What I mean by that is to raise venture capital for example, is going to require you to really compress your time into how long it takes you to make that business successful. So a normal typical business would be going for 10, 11, 12 years before it really starts to see the payoff. It really starts to see the gains rose venture capital asks you to do it in three or five, and if you want to work at the speed of three x or five x speed, then by all means raise venture capital if you feel that you are young enough with the energy and the wherewithal to grow and scale and deliver that kind of business.

(20:07):

The other thing about certain types of financing is there's different expectations on profit. So going back to venture capital, there's less of an expectation even though the market is not great right now and people are focused on profit, most venture backed businesses are not actually profitable, which kind of feels a bit strange actually. If you are used to running a small business and having to manage your p and l and manage your balance sheet, you might feel a little bit uncomfortable with how you spend the money. You're basically giving it to ads to grow. And that a methodology that is relatively new and still kind of unproven in my opinion, actually. You might want to be the type of entrepreneur who builds a sustainable, slow, profitable business that impacts your local community, impacts the world in a different way, and therefore you might want to crowdfund, you might want to not raise at all.

(21:16):

You might want to build your business very slowly in order to then scale through private equity. There are all of these different options out there to you. And I think looking at the media stories about big successful funding rounds or being envious of other entrepreneurs that have been able to back their business with different kinds of money, you don't know what that money's going to cost them. So the best thing you can do is stay in your lane, reflect on your own work ethic, reflect on the type of business you want to build, and then find the appropriate financing for that story.

Nic Cary (21:56):

Yep. I think it's very, very wise there. Most people don't realize it. Venture capital firms place loads of capital into lots and lots of bets, basically, and they're really only counting on maybe one of those things working out. And so the irony of that sort of specific type of funding is that most of the businesses that get backed actually are unsuccessful and the pressures to do rapid development and growth and find product market fit and achieve wide scale business results is very, very rare. And so the more tried and true approach is to work on your product market fit, develop a customer base, develop a community, get fervent fans and grow methodically. And that's also another path. And so there are just different ways of doing things. One of the things I wanted to ask you, because I know you've gotten the opportunity to work with larger teams and have hired a lot of people, what is your favorite way to assess talent? Do you have a favorite interview question? How do you go about building a team around you?

Sharmadean Reid (23:01):

So I read this exercise in High-Growth Handbook, which was writing a guide to working with me, whereby the COO of Stripe had gone from a couple of hundred people to a couple of thousand people, and she was like, how do I create a shortcut to my employees understanding who I am? So she wrote a user manual for herself as a human. I replicated that and I wrote a guide to working with Sharmaine and I presented it to my company. And now every time we hire somebody, we ask them to do a guide to working with Nic or a guide to working with Kelly and then present it within the first four weeks during their probation period to the company. The types of questions in this guide are how I'm motivated, what demotivates me, how I'm productive, who my family are, what I do outside of work, all of these different questions that effectively create a picture of who that team member is and how they fit into the company.

(24:11):

So I wouldn't say it's an interview question, but mostly that guide helps me understand whether this hire is going to work out or not. And also it helps me understand where someone might not last in the team because they don't have the same values as what the rest of the company represents. There's a couple of times when I saw somebody's guide and I was like, okay, I can kind of foresee where there might be an issue, so let me mitigate that now really early on before it gets to a problem. So this guide has been one of the best things we've ever done for our company culture, and I highly recommend it.

Nic Cary (24:59):

I am definitely going to recommend that to other entrepreneurs that are hiring people and working to build cultures early. I love that idea. Thank you for sharing that with us. Okay, maybe one or two more questions. Let's see. A lot of us, one of the things I know that's important about the stack world is connecting people with each other, especially women in business and other entrepreneurs. What's your perspective on how either women or any entrepreneur develop and cultivate relationships with either mentors, advisors, or sponsors in their careers? And how important are those types of relationships to entrepreneurs and your community members?

Sharmadean Reid (25:41):

We always say at the stack world that it's knowledge plus network gives someone their power. So what information are you getting and who are you sharing it with? And there's been so much said about mentors and sponsors. What I think is really important is the relationships you build within your peer group. So if you are a young person in business, you might be preoccupied with meeting an older, more established entrepreneur in order to learn lessons from them. Whereas actually you are in a really unique position whereby you are already part of the community, you just don't know it yet. And that community is the community of entrepreneurs around you. And I always advise young people in entrepreneurship to start building their network, their peer group very early on so that you can grow and learn together. Now, granted, some people are going to drop out, some people are going to say, this isn't for me.

(26:45):

Some people are going to surpass you. They're going to progress way further than you, and maybe their community's not right for them anymore, or some people are going to lag behind and you need to help them and bring them up. But creating your peer group is so important because you're all on this journey together and the journey is very difficult, very lonely. So one of the things I do now in the stack world is if there's a group of six to eight women who want to create a peer group, I will help them create that peer group and help them set it up and kind of formulate the cadence and the questions and kind of like a young president's organization format, what can they do on a regular basis to keep that community going? Because when you are young and you're busy, you always think, I don't have time for this. I don't have time to go to the meeting. I don't have time to network with my peers. And it's very easy to let it slip, especially women who will deprioritize that self investment for all of the millions of other things they've got to do. So I definitely think that while mentors and sponsors are really important, it's also worth investing in your P group with all of the other people who are at the same level as you.

Nic Cary (28:08):

So if I had to summarize, it's like you said, knowledge plus network give you your power. You can find that at the stack world and thinking earlier on about cultivating and investing in that peer group so you can find your compatriots, find people that can be there through all the steps of your journey, give you strength and support through it is extremely important. So thank you for sharing that. All right. One last question, and you sort of alluded to it, which is that entrepreneurship can be this very difficult, sometimes highly stressful, lonely, disappointing journey, but also rewarding and interesting and fulfilling. Talk to us a little about what advice would you give to early stage entrepreneurs that are sort of in that scary zone? What tips can you give our listeners for how to manage that stress that comes with building your business and your career early on?

Sharmadean Reid (29:04):

I think a big part of the stress comes from feeling that you have to go at a consistent, accelerated steady pace, but actually anytime you can choose to slow down, the way I like to approach it is I never stop. I continue to put one foot in front of the other and make forward progress. But it's okay if that progress is very, very slow. The pressure is often, I must hit this by this, when actually you can just stroll for a little bit while you regroup, you recover, you avoid burnout. So yeah, I think it's like Confucius or some famous person said, it doesn't matter how slow you go, as long as you don't stop. And that's the advice I would give.

Nic Cary (29:58):

I like that a lot. Okay. Thank you so much. You covered so many topics today with us, and I think there are a few things that really stuck out to me. I mean, you're someone that's always trusted your intuition and your community, and I think there's something really important for young entrepreneurs to think about there because they're about to create the next version of our culture, and they're going to change everything from how we think about our relationship to products and experiences, to fashion, to how we interact with the natural world to our politics. And really the baton keeps getting passed to the next generation. So I think investing in early communities, co-creating your brand, talking to people, that was something that really stood out to me. I think the way you described trying to connect with someone and see if they're in their eyes, they're lighting up when you share an idea with them.

(30:48):

And that's another trap you mentioned, which I think is great to point out, is that so many early stage business owners or entrepreneurs are fearful about their ideas being stolen from them. But I think it's so important to validate your ideas and find those early supporters that you need to get good at talking about your business and listening to customers and reacting to them and addressing their concerns and questions. And then moving on a little bit the value of that peer community. I see it in what you've done at the stack world. It's obvious in the people that follow you and support you and your businesses. So it's so important to do that. And then lastly, you hit something super important, which is in the British spirit, I think in World War ii, Churchill once said, just never, ever, ever give up. And it's okay to slow down and to put one foot in front of the other.

(31:37):

You don't want to trip over yourself. And so there are times where you do need to probably work at a slightly faster pace. And then there are times where you can take a breath and collect yourself and rebuild your reserves and energy. And a lot of it is just about managing that time and energy and motivation. And I think you expressed that really beautifully. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and joining us. So in conclusion, at skysthelimit.org, we connect under estimated entrepreneurs with volunteer business professionals for free one-on-one mentoring. We also provide business guides to all our members and monthly funding opportunities. So you can sign up for free today, and if you like what you heard, please subscribe and share.

OUTRO (32:22):

Thanks for listening to the First Buck podcast. Don't forget to join the community of underrepresented entrepreneurs and their supporters by signing up at skysthelimit.org. Click subscribe and we'll see you next time.