Defining Success On My Own Terms During The “Toothpick Airplane” Whiplash Trip That Is Entrepreneurship

“As long as I’m not becoming homeless, I think I’m doing ok business wise,” was my flippant and semi-true response to peers questions about how I was feeling about the business I was building. Entrepreneurship feels like taking off in a half built airplane made with toothpicks, powered by Flintstone style yabba-dabba-do-foot-grit that you hope transforms into a shiny, streamlined airbus that lands beautifully at an unknown destination in the end. Entrepreneurship is filled with tons of unknowns that, depending on your various levels or privileges and resources, or lack there of, can make or break your livelihood. So when folks would ask how things were going and I wasn’t sure, I was honest as hell.

I created The New Quo in 2014, and it was first a content platform to share stories of black creativity and entrepreneurship overlooked by mainstream media. In 2018, I transformed TNQ into a training company focused on leadership and inclusive culture change (peep the video above for the explainer!) for companies and start ups through live trainings, courses, consulting, and using story as a tool for behavior change. After testing, flipping and reversing Missy Elliot style this business off and on for 5 years while working full time, and scraping together 20k of my own money I painstakingly saved up over a few years (what I called my “fuck you” fund) so I wouldn’t have to make concessions on the impact, growth, or goals of the business, I took the leap to full time entrepreneurship two years ago. I set off in that toothpick airplane of business, pedaling furiously to take flight with a big ass goofy grin on my face.

The current version of The New Quo is inspired by my childhood of being an extreme outsider racially, religiously, and politically. I witnessed how powerful narrative was for how laws and culture was created. Fear-driven narratives shared at school, church, TV, businesses and more shaped minds, and led to inequitable and hostile outcomes that my family and I dealt with on a daily basis -- from getting the police called on our home numerous times when we weren’t even there, to being followed around every store we entered. We were stared at so in much in public my mom used to say to us, “Don’t worry baby, they stare because you’re a star.” (motivational reframe of racism if there is one!).

My business was also inspired from my 10 year career using narrative to drive marketing and business outcomes, closing 6.5 million in sales with the teams I worked with and motivating 300k young people to take action on social issues through story campaigns I built with amazing colleagues. Although I hit some amazing milestones, in those roles I saw first hand how adept companies were at using stories to do things that many times weren’t that interesting or useful, while not realizing the narratives that shaped their toxic, unsustainable, ashy-ankled and crusty internal culture and leadership structures. I’d watch my colleagues adopt masks of who they felt they must be to succeed, stifling their own truths, opinions, and talents for fear of discrimination and judgement. I’d see organizations desperately strive for money-only based goals motivated by fear and scarcity, losing any clear sense of values, culture, and integrity. I’d discover the tactical, emotionless, and at times manipulative ways we tried to communicate with one another internally and externally with the people we were trying to serve. I realized how often we only celebrated creativity and innovation when it came from a non-melanated, male source. I knew a totally different leadership and workplace model was possible, and I wanted to help make that happen as my own mission. As a Black woman I knew my path of entrepreneurship would be slow, intentional, and more challenging than other peers, and I was ok with making my own way on my own terms. I measured success of The New Quo over time by answering one question: “Am I happy, healthy, making something I believe in that is having a positive impact, working with people who I admire and like, and able to pay the bills?”

In a world where business is only evaluated and discussed in dollars and cents, I many times felt like a fish out of water, balancing a new unconventional model — narrative intelligence as this tool for a new style of leadership and behavior change — with making sure I could pay my bills and setting goals that had a bigger bottom line than just the money involved. I hustled, pitched, took many phone calls, strategized and researched and made slow incremental progress of booking clients and getting things off the ground as a soloprenuer. I was ghosted by leads, ignored on emails, under-appreciated and devalued by potential partners and collaborators, and at one point when Covid 19 hit in February 2020, I figured I was going to have to close everything down and start again after losing all my clients and only having a few thousand left in the bank to survive a few months.

Thank goodness the seeds I sowed over the years started to bear fruit, and completely flourished in tandem with the terrible incidents of multiple social and health pandemics that forced people to make unconscious social issues conscious. These issues were dusted under the societal and corporate rugs for so long and piled up so high, some of us tripped, stumbled, and broke every bone trying to pretend they didn’t exist, while others frantically pointed and shouted at the racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and many other “isms” squished under a rug that was as transparent as a wet white t-shirt contest. The injustice of George Floyd’s murder was a significant turning point in conversation, creating acknowledgement and some semblance of truth telling on an international stage about how society is broken and not working. From that inflection point, I got a torrential outpouring of inquiries at my digital door.

Where is The New Quo today? My work has now been interacted with by 18,200 people across conferences, workshops, and online courses. I’ve scaled revenue to multiple six figures and have a path to the seven figure mark in the next 1-2 years. I’ve been featured in Forbes, Nasdaq, Business Insider and more, and most importantly, I’ve collected positive data on the impacts my work is creating in mindset and behavior change from my content, trainings, and facilitated discussions around inclusive leadership, belonging, and online moderation, which is being evaluated with one client by Stanford University to be released in an academic paper next year. I’ve seen breakthroughs, new connections made, and eyes opened. I’ve been able to sing, crack jokes, and bring my full self into my work in ways I didn’t think were possible, all in the hopes that I could teach how we all have immense power to let go of inequitable narratives that are holding us all back from our fullest potential.

I was speaking to a friend a few weeks ago about my career and business journey and she noted she was so proud that my success was so sudden, and I recalled that this journey has been a long one. One that started with self-reflection of what I enjoy doing and stepping into the power of where my strengths and talents lie, and a desire to use them to see the world around me left just a little bit better; of the many nights reading through behavioral science studies, scheduling informational chats with peers who had business models I admired, hiring a business coach to get off the ground and out of my own head when I first started to transition into a training company, hours of reworking sales, branding, marketing, content, and website copy on my own, and tweaking service delivery, responding to inquiries and creating things I didn’t think were possible, pivoting when feedback came in, joining entrepreneur communities of like minded people and providing value that led to unexpected referrals. Any success story you see is the tip of the iceberg with a long, murky, winding road underneath the surface. The stories we tell are powerful -- powerful personally in terms of how we feel about ourselves, and socially by how they define how others see us. One thing I talk about constantly in my work and trainings is the power of narrative inquiry, and reframing the false narratives that have driven a wedge between who you are and who you want to be. They can be changed, and reshaped to see a new outcome. I have experienced many adversities as so many of us do, yet I know they do not define who I am or my story, they simply shape the larger narrative. And they can for you too. If my own story means anything, know that your creativity, purpose, and impact are in your hands and you are capable of creating a path you didn't think possible.