Empowering Women Entrepreneurs And Building Community
Navigating entrepreneurship as a newbie while building your community can be both exciting and challenging. In this episode of ‘Build Your Digital Community’ Episode 103, Stephanie Cartin, founder of Entreprenista and Socialfly, unravels the art of community building, strategic networking, and entrepreneurial triumph. Gain insights into resourceful networking, authentic connections, and thriving within a collaborative ecosystem from her wealth of experience.
What Is Entreprenista?
Entreprenista is a media company and membership community dedicated to serving women founders and leaders, giving all the best resources, advice, tools, community connections, support – everything that's needed, especially in the early days of growing and scaling a business.
Ask For Help & Try New Things When Building Your Community
In the early stages of building a business, it's absolutely key to reach out, ask for help, and really listen to the advice of folks who've been in the game longer than you. Learning from their experiences can make a world of difference.
Never be scared to ask for help or try new things. That’s how you figure everything out. One thing will lead to the next.
Setting Boundaries When Building Your Community
As a busy business owner, you may feel that you don't have the capacity to commit to one-on-one coffee chats with each person who asks. There's so much to do when you're building a little empire.
Yet, it can be challenging if you are someone who wants to give back and share advice with fellow entrepreneurs. You want to be maximizing your time, but you also know that relationships are so core to what you do. It can be such a push and a pull.
The solution? Organized community.
Communities like Entreprenista solve this dilemma by hosting dedicated office hours over Zoom with incredible founders and experts who want to give their time to help other founders, but can't spend all day doing it. They are able to do it in one hour versus ten hours spread out over the course of a year.
Can You Share Too Much For Free?
It all comes down to the execution. Someone actually has to do the work. As a consultant or as a service provider and consultant, you do have to share things with people to win business. Someone isn't going to hire you without a proposal or without seeing how you think.
If you're doing free work for months and months at a time, that's not okay. But that upfront consultation to prove you have the knowledge, skills, and ability to be that great partner for them is key.
If you’re worried about showing up on social media or putting out too much information, don’t be. No one's ever going to know what you do unless you talk about it. They're not going to know how good you are until you're passionate about it.
Pour in, share and be generous. If you're sharing things that someone can execute on and they are doing well with the strategy you gave, they're likely going to remember that you were the one who gave away that strategy. Then, when their business is booming from that strategy, they're eventually not going to be able to keep managing it. They will probably come right back to you for help.
Prioritize Having A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System
As a new business owner, you want to be meeting new people, building your network, and nurturing those relationships. But you also want to be tracking them and putting these connections into systems to be able to pull from. Having a CRM (customer relationship management) system is the best way to accomplish this.
To start, block an hour a week, even if it's 30 minutes twice a week to have two 15 minute phone calls or Zooms during that time. We can maximize the time and value we provide with tools and resources that exist in our digital world.
The CRM Stephanie recommends is Copper. Yet, if you’re just starting out, a Google Sheet works great, too! Anything that you think you're gonna remember in your head when you're running a business, you probably won't, so get it written down somewhere.
Community Over Competition
There is enough work for all of us and we all can rise together. In the United States alone, there are 13 million women-owned businesses. You alone can't service 13 million businesses. None of us would ever be sleeping if we were doing that. Bottom line: There is so much business to be had out there.
We all can learn from each other. People can set up referral partnerships and agreements. People can refer clients to each other. As business owners, we learn so much by doing and we shouldn’t need to keep everything a secret. Share your tips to help other founders go and get business!
How To Show Up In A Community
Join communities that feel right for you. Show up as yourself authentically, and make genuine connections, friendships, and business relationships. Share your expertise, give away knowledge, and position yourself as a thought leader. It will come back to you in a positive way.
In business, we're all dealing with a lot of the same challenges. Prioritize having a group that you can go to to ask questions and get really quick answers without spending two hours trying to Google something. At the end of the day, all we have is our time. Optimize for the time that you have.
You don't want to enter a community platform and say: here's my services, do you want to buy them? That's not what sells. People want to do business with people they know they care about and trust.
If you show up and share more about yourself and your business so people know you. Then, when they're out in the world and meeting other people, you’re going to be that person that's top of mind and easy to refer. That's how you end up with the opportunity to get business from the communities that you're present in.