Ascent Strategy

As a woman of color, having built and run 3 businesses has equally been a life-changing path for me as it has been a harsh, as***le of a teacher.

There’s no question that I would’ve lived in a completely different universe if entrepreneurship never entered my life. Entrepreneurship turned my parents from immigrants with $1 to their name to successful storefront owners in one of Manhattan’s busiest neighborhoods. Their experience influenced my journey and snowballed it into where I am now.

I’ve learned a lot from this journey, including getting hyper-educated about money, what privilege looks like to different groups of people, and how BIPOC entrepreneurship looks different from non-BIPOC folks.

The money lessons were hard — it sucked to experience scarcity and cutting corners when I was chasing ambitions that deserved more. It was hard to unlearn how I grew up with money (from parents who grew up in an impoverished country) when it completely opposed how I was encouraged to think about money as an entrepreneur.

As my perception got stronger, I was able to pick up on all the ways I and other women of color accrued wins at slower rates than men or white peers. Seeing that you have odds stacked against you is a hard pill to swallow, it makes your losses feel a bit more sour and like your wins are fleeting.

I’ve never felt angrier or more understood than connecting myself to other BIPOC entrepreneurs. When I get to know BIPOC entrepreneurs, I’m disappointed that we have similar experiences that are clearly a mountain range of patterns, but I feel comforted that we can connect over shared experiences and learn from them together.

(Continued in comments)

Taking advice from the myriad of online experts on how to build a business can be helpful until you start to get into the weeds of generating revenue.

Then the advice gets really unreliable.

Learning how an entrepreneur hit 7-figures in business is not helpful if you’re still operating under 6. Taking notes on Seth Godin’s marketing gems only gets you so far when there aren’t ex*****on steps to pair with it.

Startup intel can become a bust once you hit a certain threshold.

You can’t take the same cocktail that a VC-backed startup founder took and expect it to give your business the buzz it needs.

Here are three commonly shared tips that don’t work for most homegrown startups, and what works instead.

Marketing doesn’t always equate to sales, which makes it incredibly confusing if you’re an entrepreneur trying to understand where best to hedge your bets.

I’ve made the very expensive mistake of posting content on social media for years, without seeing any true ROI from it. I’ve been guilty of sending out emails that no one wanted to read, and taking too much advice from the Internet about aggressive marketing tactics that end up bugging people.

When did marketing get so complicated? In my opinion, marketing that produces sales shouldn’t require this much wayfinding. It’s simple when done right.

Here are the only three marketing actions you need to take if you want to cut through the BS and make some sales 👉🏼

The start of the year is an experimental month for many of us as we explore what works and doesn’t in helping improve our lives in the new year.
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A pet peeve of mine is when I waste hours of the day on nothing that felt meaningful to me. So for 2022, my goal was to live up to my desire to juice the productivity and intention out of every hour of my day — whether it’s personal or work-related.
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I consulted tried and true methods and did a lot of YouTube sleuthing to organize my experiment. I learned a lot to make meaningful progress on my work, health, and life admin goals and truly feel set in good, new habits for the new year.
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Here are some of my favorite changes that I set into motion in January 👉🏽 •
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A couple of weeks ago I kicked around the idea of creating an Entrepreneur Performance Review to help entrepreneurs assess their performance at the end of the year, similar to how an employee at a company is given a performance review by their boss. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I wanted to think through a tool that allows you to assess yourself as a boss to yourself.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The intention of this review is to put a spotlight on the areas of your startup journey (build, growth, self, rest) that need more work and cultivation.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I hope that doing this review gives you insight on the areas of your business you should focus on in the new year and helps you craft a 2022 agenda with fresh eyes.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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You can find the Entrepreneur Performance Review for your use at my link in bio. Fill it out and let me know how you did in your review!

There’s a park near my house that my dog voraciously pulls me towards every day. He is charging with all his strength to go see Chris (named changed for privacy), a boxing instructor who teaches classes in the park and feeds him bougie dog treats.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Chris loves dogs so much that he will actually stop his class if he sees my dog in the distance so that he can grab his bag of treats and feed him. I’ve seen dogs line up to get a treat from Chris and by my estimation, I think that he spends about $240/month on dog treats.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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It may seem like he has an expensive hobby, but Chris is no dumb dumb. The treats are a marketing expense. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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It’s not a surprise that I see students in his class working out with their dogs — Chris has converted a meaningful number of his visiting dog parents into students.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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What Chris has realized is that his students dominantly fit a specific profile — they're millennials, they like working out at spaces within walking distance to their home, and they have a fur baby.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Rather than hitting people over the head with pitches on how great his boxing classes are, Chris knows that this won’t work because there are hundreds of other workout classes in Brooklyn with the same pitch. What these classes don’t have that Chris has are weekly visits with potential customers (led by their dogs) who have grown to trust him.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I share this to say — marketing isn’t about 24/7 direct pitches about your product or service. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Sometimes it’s about knowing your customers well and appealing to the human in them who loves and is interested in a million other things. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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If you’re worried that you’ll seem random by talking about something other than your product, remember that Chris sold boxing classes with dog treats. What you talk about won’t seem random if it’s a part of your personality — no one’s all work and no play after all.