Lessons from 15 years in business
Today I celebrate 15 years in business for myself. Over the weekend, I was interviewed by a student for their thesis on leadership. This is a transcript of that interview. I hope it’s helpful!
Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Why did you become self-employed?
My name is Laurel Anne Stark. I was born and raised just outside Toronto. I have lived in Calgary as well as Victoria as well as Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. I am a University dropout. I took classes in political science and economics. When I realized that I had learned what I came to learn - which is the best way to change the world is to have money and not owe anybody in power any favors - I went into business for myself.
I’ve been self-employed for 18 years in tech. I am the founder of a self-care and success app for self-employed women called www.resurgo.co. I also founded a digital marketing agency and currently run a communications consulting agency.
How did you get started?
I am a third-generation entrepreneur & salesperson. I have sold everything from vacuum cleaners to honorary memberships to America's Most Wanted. At the beginning of my career, I was cold calling. I worked at a large telecom company for three and a half years selling high-speed internet. I was ranked in the top 3% of salespeople at the organization, but what I realized is that I really didn't appreciate the culture there. I felt undervalued as an employee. I felt like the customers were also undervalued and I felt like so much was out of my control, just working like a numbered human in a large corporation.
When I got the opportunity to search for a small boutique agency in 2003, I started as a commission-only salesperson selling websites, essentially by using my cold calling skills, cold calling people out of Yellow Pages, and asking them if they had a website. We were like building the first websites that people had ever had, like the five-page brochure with the home page, about us page, contact page, and portfolio pages. So I sold so many websites that eventually I was offered a partnership in the agency. I took it.
What’s one of the biggest mistakes you’ve made in your career?
Actually, the day I signed on as an entrepreneur I unknowingly signed on for $80,000 worth of debt owed jointly and separately between four partners. That was the most expensive mistake I’ve ever made in terms of not doing due diligence, not knowing that you're supposed to check contracts, not knowing even what due diligence it is.
After three years of that company, with the other four partners things started to just kind of fall apart. So I started my own agency in 2006, a digital marketing agency called The New Media Group from there so we started off just doing websites. In our first year, we got the majority market share in Calgary, for homebuilders. So, we specialized in developing websites for home builders, contractors, and anything to do with real estate.
The first few years in business are notoriously tough, how was it for you?
Well, two years after I started, in 2008, the market tanked and with it so had my income. It was a pretty kind of lean, scary couple of years. I should add as well that during this time, to cope, I was basically working and drinking. Ever since I became self-employed, my drinking really increased and it got even worse around 2008, just trying to deal with the financial pressure like having tons of bills and like no money coming in. It was really, really hard. I tried to apply for a job as a waitress but they didn't give me the job.
I honestly don't know how it made it through those years really.
In 2011 I moved back to the west coast from Calgary as I needed to focus on my health. I hit a bottom with my health, I was told I had pre-cancerous cells, I was burnt out and I had come to the realization that I needed to stop drinking.
Did you change your business as a result of your health scare?
Yes, I looked at the model I had built with my agency which is that I had like 80 or so clients and we were basically creating providing an entire umbrella of online marketing services, everything from websites to social media to search engine optimization, to advertising to video to email, and I had about 15 different contractors that I was working with that helped deliver the services.
I realized as I was working through my healing journey that, at that time I was a perfectionist and a people pleaser, and very controlling. I realized that I had built myself a middle management job, which I really didn't like, so I pivoted into consulting. I've been in business and communications consulting now for probably five or six years. In this capacity, I’ve been providing strategy and advice for large companies like Investor’s Group and mentoring entrepreneurs one on one.
How did you end up founding an entrepreneurial women’s wellness & productivity app?
As I was consulting and mentoring, I noticed that some of the issues that female entrepreneurs tend to experience around visibility, marketing, that type of thing stemming from other systemic issues. So 2018 we started researching the obstacles self-employed women face to success and in November of 2019, I founded resurgo.co - the first tool specifically designed to support entrepreneurial women to succeed in life in business. We are currently beta testing the app with our community.
Last fall we released the first report that's ever been done on the state of female entrepreneur mental health, which we were lucky enough to get worldwide media coverage on featured in Forbes, MSN and Techround UK. The reports underlined all the challenges that female entrepreneurs face. We analyzed over 200 different studies; everything from academic reports to web polls, and you know, concluded that that women basically Self Employed Women face generally up to three times greater obstacles than the average population when it comes to doing well. So that's the problem that resurgo.co seeks to solve. Last fall we also crowdfunded, were able to raise 14,000 Canadian 10,000 us in pre-orders for the product, which we hope to have released as soon as possible.
I heard you say that you used to drink a lot and your healing journey has been a big part of empowering your leadership. What else do you do to empower your leadership today?
I’d say four things:
I bring in people that are good at things that I'm not good at. And I try to empower them, support them and get out of their way. I strive for that servant leadership model where you know, I'm checking in with anybody that I work with, and like trying to find out what they need and how we can support them to achieve you know, our goal.
I'm also really big on sharing, like bigger vision. For example, we want to get resurgo.co in the hands of like a million women by 2030. And the reason we want to do that is to improve their well-being because if women were supported properly, female entrepreneurs specifically would be able to contribute $12 trillion to the global economy. So that's a pretty big “why”. When it comes to delegating and tasks, understanding the difference between expectations versus agreement and really getting agreement as opposed to just having expectations.
I try to be collaborative. I tried to also build in space and time and understand that there need to be resources allocated for like when things go sideways because they do especially in tech. And just understanding that and also just having like some more self-awareness around like where my boundaries are in terms of my limitations and my needs as well because if I'm not like, running at like empty, then I’m a much better leader.
I'd also add one more thing is like really transparent about my flaws as well and my faults and my vulnerabilities because I feel like if I am that other people can share their stuff too. And also I think it's it's it helps people understand like why I need them in their roles, showing like what I'm not great at and then we have to like work together better. That's it.
What do you do personally, to generate your own leadership for yourself?
The first is that I have actively sought out and created a support system for myself to give me not just accountability, but the ability to have a community of people that I trust that I can speak with on a regular basis.
I created a high-performance environment like this for myself. Because leadership especially in entrepreneurship is so isolating. Try to do it alone... it's not really that great. So I surround myself with different professionals that can serve to assist me, like a ton of different coaches and mentors and stuff like that, that check-in with me on a regular basis. I'm able to then bring my struggles to them and ask them what they think or what they would do. Then I can sort of gauge how their response feels my body and just kind of use my intuition that way but also like, bring in thought leadership from people who are way smarter than me, which I super appreciate.
The second thing is around my self-care and whatnot. I have a real routine that I stick to. I change it up every once in a while but I definitely have a morning routine that I do. This involves basically like just kind of checking in with myself like I do some morning pages (which I don't know if you guys are aware of but it's basically three pages where you just kind of bring down everything you're thinking about.) And then I've just recently over the last couple of months I’ve started tapping, it’s the Emotional Freedom Technique, So I tap on any sort of limiting beliefs or things that don't serve me, and then I'll meditate and I have a gratitude practice as well. So that really helps me remember where I'm going keeps me aware of what I might be putting in the way of that and gives me tools to like, actively work through that stuff.
I am also ambitious and transparent about my goals. As I said, I want resurgo.co in the hands of a million women by 2030. I want to be able to build a men's version by 2025. I think the more that I speak those things out loud, the more that I tell people what we're looking to do, the better sort of energy and I can bring to the project
What kind of electronic support do you use or what kind of apps do you use?
Oh my god. A lot! Okay, so the first thing I'm absolutely in love with it and it's on sale right now for Black Friday. It's called a remarkable. It's basically a paper replacement tablet. Basically, it allows me to carry like 1000 notebooks, and I can handwrite so I've got my like journal with me. I've got like, like a bunch of courses that I'm taking that sort of thing. It’s something I definitely use for my morning pages and anytime I need to write stuff out because I feel like when you're writing and drawing things, it just accesses a different part of the brain. I think enables you to tap into your subconscious more so I really that's a super valuable tool
I definitely have like meditation music on my phone. I use Insight Timer, as well. There's a couple of go-to sleep meditations that I really like. I use Spotify for music. I have different types of music I listen to for different activities like some for focus some for cheering me up some for waking me up some for calming me down.
I do use www.tomato-timer.com which uses the Pomodoro Technique which is 25 minutes focus five minutes break. It’s great for focused time chunking which can help with productivity.
I also use todoist.com which is basically the place where I dump all my thoughts. It acts as a to-do list but you can also create it as a kanban board so it can be a project management tool as well, and you can assign people to things, but I basically just use it to remind like keep track of all the things I'm doing. Then I look at my list and create that I chunk time off in my calendar to do the work. I definitely do use Do Not Disturb on my phone.
I just started using Libby which is actually great. It allows you to get a progressive library card and then you can read books on your phone or listen to an audiobook, it is cool.
What's been your biggest lesson in leadership?
I think it's being able to metabolize criticism. So I'm lucky enough to have a lot of people who I really admire helping me with resurgo.co - people who've been tremendously helpful and that are in positions of influence, etc. They have told me some stuff I really didn't want to hear. Like the first mentor, I ever had on this project told me the very first time I pitched resurgo.com in front of investors that he hated my pitch. And that was super hard to hear because I worked on it really hard. I had hired a speaker coach and did like the best I possibly could under the circumstances.
I've had other people tell me stuff I didn't want to hear as well. And looking at that, instead of having an ego tantrum about I allow myself to have like, feel whatever it feels like but like also take that in and like look at it as an opportunity for growth. Like if someone's going to tell me to take the time to tell me what I could do better, it behooves me to listen and to swallow my pride and ask them for more. Now I ask, could you please elaborate on that? What else can you tell me? Is there anything else that you think I can improve on?
So it’s taking that stuff down and then actually trying to work on it. Yeah, I think that's helped me grow the most. It's painful but effective.
If you were to think of a time that you felt disempowered in your career, could you tell me a little bit about that? And also what supported you and working through it?
I've experienced a ton of sexual harassment as most women have. And that's always super disempowering, especially when you're working for yourself and you're just like, Okay, well, I can't exactly go to HR or like tell this guy's boss because he's the boss. I'm the boss.
I think t earlier on in my career when I was, super young I worked on a construction site for three months. I was the only female on-site and what I had to deal with at that time was pretty rough. Going through like the different healing journeys and stuff like that, like learning about boundaries and like learning about, how to have uncomfortable conversations and how to take ownership of my stuff, but not take ownership of other people's stuff. So, I finally hit a point in my career where I had a guy and he like, told me this elaborate story about an erection in a sales meeting, like face to face. He came highly recommended to me, he's a leader in the industry, well known in our little town, and if I said his name, you probably know it. So I sat there listening to the story, and I was just like, grossed out and then I was really proud of myself because I I told him that it made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I said, I think you need to find somebody else to work on this project with you and he apologized and everything like that.
I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with, unwanted messages on the internet. And like, what I've learned is I don't have to engage and that has brought me a lot of peace. Because unfortunately that's what happens as a woman if you dare to ask for any sort of visibility or try to promote yourself and that's why a lot of women do have hesitancy around it is because it can be unsafe.
If you were mentoring and up an coming leader, what advice would you have for them?
First of all, like, no matter what you do, take care of your health. Just take care of your health, especially your mental health. If you don't know what that is or how to do that - learn - that's your first like job. The reason I say that is because without that you have absolutely nothing I've been through like some serious challenges, mental health-wise and I’ve burnt out a couple of times and just found myself in situations where it couldn't perform to the level that I wanted to, and it's, that's the most disempowering thing.
I feel like if you're taking good care of yourself, then at least you're in a decent position to handle what leadership is going to throw at you, which is going to be you know, super challenging and difficult, especially in the entrepreneurial space and especially in the tech space.
I know that the culture is predominantly about that hustling, grind, and all about that self-sacrifice to succeed. I'm just here to say it's absolutely not worth it because you can't buy it back. You cannot buy your health back.
The second thing I would say is like yeah, surround yourself with supportive people. Whether you have to pay for the people or you have them as a friend group. If your family, friends, and spouse don't like or get what you're doing, find people who do get it. It can be incredibly isolating that definitely contributes negatively to mental health. When you surround yourself with people who are at a higher level than you it's inspiring and they show you that they can do it as well. Definitely get a mentor.
Invest in some sort of practice to help you with your self-awareness, emotional intelligence and communication skills. Those are the three biggest skills that can take you anywhere.
My last piece of advice is that success is 95% tenacity and 5% skills. Just keep going - never give up. Never ever, ever give up. If it's something that you believe in, and you will succeed. But that's you have to just like keep going no matter what, and it's gonna suck sometimes, but it'll be worth it.
What advice would you have for a first-time entrepreneur?
Before you spend a dime figure out what problem you solve, for who, and the value you provide.
Create one iteration and then get feedback, do this before you spend a ton of money on your marketing.
Listen to your customers, the questions they ask, the objections they give you. Use this feedback to improve your product or service.
Start with 5 case studies or testimonials. That’s all you need. Get them by working for free at first if you have to. They’re that important.
Who you know is more important than what you know. Grow your network!
Failing is part of success. The more you fail, the more successful you will be.
If you’re scared and uncomfortable that means you’re doing it right.
Make time to work on your business, not just in it.
Repeat customers are gold. Treat them well.
Don’t compete on price, compete on value.
Don’t charge hourly, charge for value.
Diversify your streams of income. Once you have one established, create more. This creates more stability.
Trust your gut
Always read the fine print
Invest in a good accountant, bookkeeper and lawyer. They’re expensive but not as expensive as not having them.
What advice would you give your younger self?
She wouldn't have listened, to be honest with you. In the beginning, I had to do everything myself the hard way. So I could have told her anything but she wouldn't listen.