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think it's important to seek people out because they have insights that they're able to recall from their journey in a way that was exciting for me to listen to. It was exciting to understand what mistakes they had made so I could try to avoid some of them, although I'd make enough of my own. But I listened because the more you learn the more you can minimize the mistakes, and when you're building a business that's critical.

      At the end of the day you have these people in your life as business mentors, or guides as I often call them, and you're trying to figure out how to win, how to play this game, how to be better than the next, and if you're in tech, probably faster than the next, too.

      I grew up in a single-parent household. My mother raised four of us on a salary of $29,000 a year. She was an assistant manager at Kmart, running their gardening department. My mother worked hard for whomever she was working for and everything she did, she did with excellence. She passed that down to my siblings and me.

      My mother was my role model, although she herself had not graduated from college. My grandmother had not received a formal education past the sixth grade but would live to be 103 years old. She was also my role model.

      Do you know where your story begins? My entrepreneurship story began where my mother's story left off.

      When I started SGI and then when I entered tech I was ready to work hard, but I knew I was behind. I knew that there was a knowledge curve that I had to really overcome. I wasn't out in Silicon Valley. I wasn't in New York. I wasn't in a hotbed for tech, and so I had to get really resourceful.

       The biggest risk of all is not taking one.

       —Mellody Hobson

      My good friend Sherrell Dorsey, founder of TP Insights, referred to me as the “antithesis” in an article she published for her editorial and tech platform, The Plug.

      I'm female, Black, from the South, and a nontechnical solo founder. In all respects (and perhaps statistics), I'm everything that they say a tech founder can't be.

      Overall, I've now been an entrepreneur for over 12 years, and what a roller-coaster ride it has been, from bootstrapping my first company Solid Ground Innovations (SGI) to raising capital for my second company. It's been more than what I could have imagined, and really little of what I expected. But what could I have expected, being that I had no true blueprint starting out?

      Yet, I feel that entrepreneurship was in my veins. Do you remember starting or selling anything, from Girl Scout cookies to lemonade stands? I never did either, but I did sell candy for my school's annual fundraiser. Looking back, that was a form of entrepreneurship mixed with hustle, too.

      It wasn't until a year or two ago that I acknowledged B-NOW as what in hindsight was my first business. My first hires were also students at LSU. Terry and Jonathan created my website. Another friend created my logo. I suspect it cost a few hundred bucks at the time: $50 for a logo, maybe $200 for the website with all pages included. I even enlisted my friends to write articles and to act as administrators, and hired my friend Scott to take our photos in the recreational room of the west campus apartments. I had an all-hands meeting on campus as well in Coates Hall, where I enlisted other friends to write stories for B-NOW.

      Maybe I didn't know it then, but I had created something special. A few years later, at 22 years old, I would start Solid Ground Innovations.

      At Louisiana CASA, I worked mostly on their advocacy programs and state capital projects. During this time an opportunity came about for me to start consulting for a new foundation, so I took it. This would eventually turn into an opportunity that led my work to receiving a Nobel Prize for public service, the Jefferson Award, and being recognized in the White House Report to the Senate on Volunteerism in America as the director of TTI, a nonprofit started by Tyrus Thomas, mostly running the organization, and an award-winning youth program we had created called C.A.T.C.H. (Caring and Actively Teaching Children Hope).

      It was during these early days that I really learned how to operate an organization. So when I launched my first business to the public it felt right, even if I didn't feel 100% ready—though doing the actual work would prove we never ever really feel 100% ready. We just do it. We take the leap.

      So, in 2009 I started SGI; we were a strategic communications and management agency with an arm called SGI Cares, which helped nonprofit organizations and grant makers such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation provide capacity support via technical assistance to the organizations that they fund.

      For nonprofits, we were acting as their back office in lieu of full-time employees. In my clients, I'd meet some of my biggest champions like Raymond Jetson the President and CEO of Metromorphosis, a nonprofit with a mission to transform urban communities from within.

      There are many ways to build a business. When I started SGI, there was so much I didn't know. I was so green, from state filing docs to understanding the operational and legal jargon to writing winning proposals that would ultimately land me my first clients.

      There is truth to the saying “you don't know what you don't know.” This is the case for all of us when it comes to a subject matter that is unfamiliar to us. SGI was a strategic communications and management agency. Early on we heavily specialized in nonprofit management, hence where the idea for Resilia came from.

      Some

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