(1.4) GET PUMPED - WHAT STOPPING YOU
Align all eight of the essentials—intent, authenticity, passion, patience, speed, work ethic, ability to track consumer attention and master social platforms, and content—and you have the closest thing to a formula for crushing it that I can offer. Yet I know that even a so-called formula won’t be enough to get some of you into do mode. Every day I meet people who swear they are going to start their own “thing.” Most won’t. I asked my team to give me a list of the most common reasons they’ve heard, whether in the comments sections of our content or in their interactions with other aspiring entrepreneurs, for failing to crush it. Here’s what they came up with:
I have a full-time job.
I don’t have any money.
I have kids.
I don’t have time.
My industry has too many strict rules.
I have an idea for an app, but I don’t know how to code. My parents don’t get it.
My family is holding me back.
I’m afraid my friends will get ahead of me.
I still haven’t finished the books assigned by my life coach. No one was watching.
Only a few people were reading.
I don’t know which idea to pursue.
I don’t have the right equipment.
I don’t know where to start.
I’m too old.
I’m an artist, not a businessperson.
I’m not into anything monetizable.
I’m afraid I’ll get hate comments.
Every one of these is bullshit, and some belong in the category of “Are you fucking kidding me?” Of the hundred or so finalists we considered before winnowing the list of Crushing It! contributors down to the ones we included in this book, only a handful were bringing in more than a moderate income at the time they decided to go all in and crush it.
Many were flat broke or barely making ends meet. Several had young children, and others were old enough to be grandparents. A number had already failed at previous attempts to build businesses. At least three had served jail time. You can write these examples off as anecdotal, but remember, we received so many responses that we couldn’t possibly include them all. If hundreds of thousands of people can figure out a way to crush it, isn’t it possible that you could, too? Isn’t it at least worth a try?
Social media and technology haven’t made the world any worse than it was before. They don’t change us; they expose us. And that’s not a bad thing. We’re always more effective against the demons we know and can identify than the ones hiding in the dark. All the reasons people throw out to justify why they’re not doing what they say they want to do boil down to one of three kinds of fear, each of which requires a different response.
Fear of Failure
Well, that’s what people say they’re afraid of, anyway. I think what they’re really afraid of is being judged by people whose opinions mean something to them.
I’m not going to minimize this. I know it well. I don’t give a crap what people think, and yet there are days when I will go to ridiculous lengths to turn around someone’s negative opinion of me because I care equally what everybody thinks about me.
Believe me, I get it, especially if you’re worried about justifying yourself to your family. I have the most supportive family in the world, and even I occasionally get razzed when one of my investments fails or something doesn’t go the way I predict it will.
So I can totally understand how devastating it would be to learn that you’ve disappointed your mom, earned the scorn of your siblings, or been dismissed by your closest friends.
But you are just going to have to find a way to get over it. Get a shrink, start practicing yoga, find a hypnotist, do whatever it takes to settle your nerves, embrace the moment, and stop caring what other people think. Commit to ignoring every single voice that threatens to undermine you.
If it’s your mom, find a respectful way to tell her you want her love but not her opinion. If it’s your friends, tell them you are grateful for their concern but they have to choose to support you or fuck off.
The only person you can’t ignore is your spouse if you have one. The way around that is to work with your husband or wife to come up with a plan that you can both live with. There will always be people around you to tell you not to do things. You have to let yourself be your sole judge and jury.
In my experience, good communication solves all things. I advise everyone in this predicament to confront the problem head-on. Sit down with the people you care most about and say, “I am going to do something I should have done ages ago.
The only thing that stopped me was my fear of what you’d say, but you need to know that I’m over that now. I don’t need your blessing, but I do need to know that I will have your support when I fail. Because I will.
Not spectacularly, I hope, but definitely in the short term. In the long term, though, I’m going to win, and it would mean the world to me to know you’ve got my back and are hoping for my success, not waiting for my failure.”
Then, no matter how they respond, start. Just like that. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can work when you’re no longer tethered by the tyranny of other people’s opinions. People who are afraid to fail will always set their goals far lower than they need to, much to the delight of their competitors.
No one who played it safe ever made it big. This is your life, and I promise you the chances of truly ruining it are slim.
Short of self-destructive behavior or a complete lack of self-awareness, there is very, very little you can do that you cannot recover from. Be clear-eyed and strategic, be willing to work harder and longer than you ever have in your life, and you won’t disappoint anyone. In fact, I predict you’ll surprise everyone.
How I’m Crushing It
Rodrigo Tasca, Tasca Studios
Rodrigo Tasca is not leading the glamorous life. The thirty-one-year-old moved back into his parents’ house in Florida to save on rent. He hired his sister to help with his videography business, and his studio was his bedroom. It’s a far cry from when he used to live in New York, where he was photographing models and shooting behind-the-scenes videos for magazines. Yet, he still thinks he’s got it better than some of his friends. In fact, he feels sorry for them.
“Moving back to Florida was a risk, but I knew that I had to get out of my comfort zone. . . . I wasn’t getting any younger. But I was willing to start back at zero and put in the work. I wake up every day and I’m happy with what I’m doing. But then I’m hanging out with some friends and they’re just like, ‘God, I hate what I’m doing.’ Dude, there’s no reason why [you should be] doing something that you hate nowadays. But they’re afraid to fail, or they’re afraid about what their image will look like.”
He gets it. It’s hard to impress women when you tell them that you’re living with your parents. “I’m thirty-one years old, definitely feel like I want to settle down more. But if I meet a girl nowadays, there has to be an understanding. I’m trying to create something bigger here, and I need to make this sacrifice for the next year-and-a-half of my life so I can have a better life, and a potentially better life for us within the next five years. If you’re not cool with that, you’re not the girl I’m looking for.”
Rodrigo started out in the restaurant business, first with his family, later working for a large corporation. About seven years ago, he won a GoPro at a company holiday party raffle. He loved playing around with it and making videos but had no intention of doing anything else with it until he visited a friend of his living in Peru. The friend was a real estate agent, and one day, when his photographer didn’t show up, he asked if Rodrigo could take the pictures instead. He agreed but then offered to take some videos of the property, too. He spent the next seven months filming and renting real estate properties in Peru.
Upon his return to the United States, he moved to NewYork for a short-lived position at one of his previous employer’s new restaurants, then paid the bills by working at a tennis club, where he landed his next job as a personal chef for a family in the Hamptons, while also freelancing with a catering company.
He discovered Crush It! when his company cooked for Techweek 2015 and he heard this Belarusian immigrant tell the story of how he made money as a New Jersey teenager buying Shaq dolls at the dollar store and returning them to Kmart across the street for a full refund. This kind of hustle was familiar to Rodrigo, whose family had moved to the States from Brazil when he was a small child. Money was tight, so when his parents would go to Costco to buy supplies for the restaurant, he’d buy a box of candy bars for six or seven bucks and sell them to his classmates at school for a dollar each.
He’d listen to Crush It! during his hour-long subway commute from his apartment in Crown Heights to cook for his clients’ family on the Upper East Side, and it convinced him to follow his passion and start filming.
Film school was financially out of the question; he was going to have to learn on the job. He started with his roommates, who were models, and then offered to do a shoot for a clothing company where one of his friends worked.
They put the shoot up on their Instagram, and it got so much attention that they invited him to shoot another event. He earned a little money for that gig, but it would be the only one that paid out of the next ten or so videos he’d create. And that was by design. While taking so many online Udemy classes that the company contacted him to find out why he was consuming so much content so fast, he was offering his services for free to anyone he could find. “I’d find someone who was having an event, and say, ‘Hey, is somebody shooting for you?’ And if they said no, I’d offer myself up.
It was pretty much, what can I do to get my foot in the door? I didn’t have the technical skills, but I figured going out and learning and getting the field experience and the opportunity to work with clients was going to benefit me in the long run, so when I was ready to charge somebody, all those skills from the free stuff I was doing would come into play.”
He had the perfect day job to accommodate his training. The family he worked for in the Hamptons and the Upper East Side would have him work about forty hours over two or three days, which left the rest of the week open for him to work on his craft. “You have to start building those connections. That’s what drove me. At first it could be discouraging, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
After about three months, he finally got paid $200 to film a behind-the-scenes video for a large publication. Eager to get away from the New York winters, he started researching the Florida market for those types of videos and discovered that there was a void. No one was doing that kind of work down there. He decided he would be the one to create a market for it.
So Rodrigo moved back to Florida in March 2016. Things did not go well.
In New York, I would find a client and then do the whole project for them, the whole process, shooting a video, editing, and producing. I thought I was going to come back to Florida and be this hotshot from New York, and then I realized that no one cares that I was in New York.
It’s one of those things; I needed to wake up and realize that the other thing I learned about from Crush It! is growing a personal brand. At first, I was like, “Hey, I’m Rodrigo Tasca from Rodrigo Tasca Productions.”
And everyone is like, “Who?” And pretty much I got a lot of doors shut on me. But then I changed my brand to Tasca Studios, and then people were willing to set up an appointment to meet with me and hear what I had to say, and learn that there was a market for small-business videos versus behind-the-scenes for magazines.
So changing that brand was like adjusting to the market, realizing that people didn’t want to hire just one guy who does it all, unlike New York, where if you’re not the one guy who does it all, they’re going to find someone else. There are still clients here who have only recently started a Facebook page.
Rodrigo is committed to helping his clients learn how to market online, teaching them the basics of Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube marketing, even when they resist at first. His persistence and commitment have paid off.
A year ago, when I started, we were calling businesses and offering free videos, and people were like, “No, we’re not interested,” or “No, we don’t need it.” Compare that to the fact that I now charge clients twelve hundred dollars for the day to shoot. I’m going to California. I just got back from Tennessee after shooting at a music festival. It’s just so crazy that within one year of hard work and hustle—where that has led me.
I could move out, but I’m considering staying at my parents’ house for another year and then getting an office space. My family is super supportive about what my sister and I are doing (she left her job and works with me full-time now). They’re like, “Whatever we can do to help. We wanna see this work out for you guys.” I really wouldn’t have made it this far without the support of my friends and family.
Fear of Wasting Time
If you’re under the age of thirty-five, this isn’t even an issue. You can always go back to the practical world in twenty-four months if you stink or hate what you’re doing. School and the nine-to-five grind are not going anywhere.
It bears mentioning that a fear of wasting time has also caused many more- established entrepreneurs to miss important opportunities. There are a lot of people who ceded ground on Instagram because they were putting all their energy into Twitter and Facebook.
The people who laughed at Snapchat should feel pretty foolish now. Every platform is worth some investment. Of course not every one will feel like a good fit, and not every platform will pay off, but you can’t know until you spend some time there. For every Snapchat and Insta where I won, there was a Socialcam where I lost.
I can assure you that whatever I learned on Socialcam made me a hell of a better player everywhere else.
People are so scared they’ll be wasting time if they try to build a business, even when their time isn’t valuable.
If you’re sacrificing time you could have spent with loved ones or doing something that brings value to your life—or hell, $50K—then I can see how that might cause you some regrets.
But if you’re giving up only your downtime—time you would have otherwise spent with Game of Thrones or some video games—how can you say it was wasted? You’re literally giving up empty hours in favor of doing something that could fill your life with joy, and you’re worried about wasting time? That’s bullshit. If you’re not 100 percent happy with your life today, it is never a waste of time to try something that could get you there.
How I’m Crushing It
Sean O’Shea, The Good Dog IG: @thegooddogtraining
When you’re young and your biggest dream is to become a professional musician, you accept that you’ll be working low- prestige, highly flexible jobs, like bartending and waiting tables, to keep you financially afloat until you make it. It goes with the territory. Everyone’s got to pay their dues. At twenty-five, even at thirty, you’re cool with it.
At forty, not so much.
For eleven years, Sean O’Shea worked as a valet, parking cars at a restaurant as well as for a company that handled private events for Beverly Hills celebrities. A drummer since the age of three, he’d played on hit records with artists like Alicia Keys, CeeLo Green, Jennifer Hudson, and Ghostface Killah. Despite being a part of some hit tracks, it was the valet work that was paying the bills, not the music. The future was not looking bright, and he was in “a bad space.”
His break came in the form of two demented dogs. Both pound puppies, at six months the Chow mix, Junior, and pit-Rhodesian, Oakley, were sweet and cute and everything you want in a puppy. But like a lot of dog owners, Sean didn’t really know what he was getting into.
Puppies require a lot of consistent training and discipline, and Sean admits he did everything wrong. At first the dogs were just obnoxious and ill-mannered, but by the time they turned two-and-a-half, they were dangerously aggressive and reactive toward other dogs. “We were a menace to the neighborhood.
They were huge, and if we were at the park and the grass was wet and they saw another dog, they would literally take off and pull me on my ass, like I was waterskiing, except on my rear across the park. I even ended up on Judge Judy because my dog had gone after another person’s dog.”
He didn’t blame the dogs; he knew the failure was his. And he knew that if he was going to keep these animals and protect them, he was going to have to figure out a way to turn things around. He started watching Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan and studying dog-training techniques. He also started doing some deep personal development work.
“To be honest, I was a pretty good mess. I studied my ass off. Not traditional books, but a lot of personal work to change my belief system, change my values, work on character, work on everything that I had never really received as a kid or as a young adult.”
It took a few years, but eventually his methods—known as “balanced training” technique—turned his dogs into models of good behavior, much to the surprise and relief of the neighbors.
The transformation was so remarkable that around 2006 he was able to start a neighborhood dog-walking business, supplementing his income as a valet and part-time musician. He became the guy who could take a giant pack of fourteen dogs out at one time and make it look easy. Naturally, people started asking him if he could train their dogs, too. As a valet and musician, he’d brought in about $20K. In his first year of training and walking, he brought in $65K. That figure doubled the second year.
Sean started to feel a new dream coalesce, one that didn’t include going on tour with a band.
Yet while he had discovered a natural ability to communicate with dogs, he was not a natural businessperson. “I didn’t know anything about business. Zero. Like the word brand, the word marketing—I didn’t know anything about any of that stuff.” He read obsessively to educate himself, however, which is how he came upon Crush It! He followed every word.
“I dove in pretty naïvely, started creating a ton of videos, starting doing a ton of Facebook. I remember simple conversations with myself: If I was the consumer out there, what would cause me to come back to a Facebook page or a YouTube channel over and over again? And the only answer I could come up with was if it helped improve my life, if it had value in that sense. And that was my guiding light.”
Even though he wasn’t comfortable on camera, he started filming videos with a cheap flip cam. “Do-it-yourself videos, a ton of teaching videos, a ton of before-and-after videos, a ton of showing what we could do, but also teaching people how they could do their own thing.” Other trainers were doing the same, but his intense efforts and the fact that he was early to the platforms, served to differentiate him and elevate his profile.
A lot of trainers at the time, whether in social media or otherwise, were in a kind of chest-beating space, like, “I’ve come out of the womb and I instantly was gifted with this thing.” My journey was more like, “I fucked everything up, and I was a wreck, and my dogs were a wreck. Here’s my journey of how I got out of there. Let me share that with you guys.” I was really transparent and doing my very best to try to share the information, the tools, the approach, the techniques, and my own blueprint for how I got out, including personal-development stuff and recommended books.
I worked obsessively. I studied, studied, studied, studied, trying to understand how to do this right and how to build this, because I was so obsessed with doing something special. I finally felt like I found my break. My biggest goal was to do something that had an impact. It sounds cheesy, but that was really where I was at. I think I struggled for so long not feeling that way that when I found the opportunity, I just went kit and caboodle all the way in. I was determined to find my answer, determined to develop, cultivate the skills so I could move forward. And I knew I had a shit ton of catching up to do. I was so far behind.
His following grew quickly. He waited until he was “overflowing” with clients before quitting the valet gig. “I’d been there eleven years, and everyone was like, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ And I was like, ‘We got plans.’”
Within a few years, he had built an international profile (he called in from Scotland for an interview for this book, after speaking in front of the Scottish Parliament about balanced training and his ideas for regulating the industry). In 2012, he opened a second location in New Orleans. He hired a partner, Laura, who had worked with some big names in Hollywood and could provide the administrative and organizational support he needed, and more trainers to handle the increased demand for his services.
Now forty-nine, Sean does very little training himself, except when especially dangerous animals come in, which he takes on until they’re safe for his team to work with. People fly their dogs in from all over the country. And trainers travel from all over the world to study with Sean and his team, learning not just training techniques but how to leverage social media for their businesses.
He spends about six hours a day creating content and responding to his community. He’s also written a book and created DVDs, and he runs a Q&A podcast. “There are so many people around the world who can’t get to us and can’t get to other trainers for help with serious stuff. We’re trying to empower people. We get feedback from people in different countries, and they’re sending pictures of their dogs off leash, fully trained, just by using our free videos. It’s really awesome.”
One thing he hasn’t done is product placements. “I don’t want to cheapen the blog. Not that [I wouldn’t do it] if something amazing came along. And I don’t mean monetarily, necessarily.
Money would be great, but there are so many cheesy products from people who don’t even build relationships. They just send you an e-mail and they’re like, ‘Hey, would you put this in your blog?’ No!” He has built the entire business through social media and his personal brand. In 2016, he grossed more than $600k.
Not a moment goes by when he’s not thinking about the business.
I have a little bit of downtime, but with Instagram Stories and Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and responding and training and running the business, there’s not a whole lot of extra time, but that’s cool for right now. It’s what’s needed in order to get things to the right space.
I’m totally down for it. To be honest, being forty years old [when I started], I don’t feel I have time to waste. It’s not a desperate thing. It’s not a freaked-out or panicky thing. It’s just, “You don’t have time, buddy. You wasted a lot of time doing a lot of stuff that didn’t serve you. Let’s go hard and see what you can make happen in the time you’ve got.”
Fear of Seeming Vain
When I wrote Crush It! in 2009, I got a good amount of grief from critics who accused me of glorifying narcissism. I don’t hear much from them anymore, because I’ve been proven right by the consumer, aka the market: developing a strong personal brand leads to business success.
Don’t worry about seeming vain. Embrace it. Everybody else who is crushing it did. Remember, smart entrepreneurs don’t care what other people think. You’ll look like an ass for a while if you walk around with a camera constantly pointed at your face, but everyone looks like an ass when trying something new. Reality TV was once a joke, remember? Now you can’t turn around without seeing a reality star on a magazine cover, a makeup counter, some exercise equipment, or a frozen-food package. Everyone’s an ass until they’re a pioneer.
Set Your Mind to Success
The most exciting part about being an entrepreneur today is that we’re still living in the early years. The pool is crowded, but there is still plenty of room for you. Get in while you can!
Look, I’m sympathetic. I didn’t learn how to swim until I was nine years old because I was too scared to put my face in the water. The only reason I finally learned was that one day I was playing air hockey at the community pool when I heard my mom clapping and cheering.
My younger sister had just figured out how to do the crawl stroke and was making her way across the pool. I ripped off my shirt, threw myself into the pool, and started swimming before my mom’s applause stopped echoing. There was no way my sister was going to learn to swim before me.
Sometimes you just have to jump into the pool, even when you’re scared.
As you gather your ideas and put your strategies in motion, set yourself up emotionally to succeed. Find your courage and strengthen your self-esteem until you feel brave enough to make some noise and invite people’s attention. Then show them that you care deeply about keeping it.
Several of the people interviewed for this book said that, while hugely inspiring, Crush It! didn’t actually compel them to change anything about how they were growing their personal brand or running their business, because they couldn’t imagine operating any other way.
Caring about quality, value, and the customer experience above and beyond anything else was already working for them. We live in such a fast, casual, cynical world that it can be almost disorienting to customers when they come into contact with someone whose eagerness to help or please bowls them over like an enthusiastic Saint Bernard.
Disorienting but also delightful. And addictive.Crush It! merely confirmed what these stellar entrepreneurs already felt deep in their hearts, and it gave them the satisfaction of knowing they were right to follow their instincts.
It’s very Wizard of Oz, actually. Let me get a little Glinda the Good Witch on you: You’ve always had the power to achieve your wildest ambitions. There is literally—literally—no reason why you can’t become an entrepreneur and influencer in 2018. It’s my greatest hope that by the end of this book, you’ll feel a lot like nine-year-old me as I hurled myself into the deep end of the pool and realized, “Oh, I can fucking swim!”
How I’m Crushing It
Mimi Goodwin, Mimi G Style IG: @mimigstyle
The school of hard knocks is a brutal place to get your formative education. Mimi Goodwin should know. Raised in Chicago by a single mother who worked two full-time jobs to make ends meet, she often spent time at her grandparents’ house, where she was molested at a young age by two male family members.
When her mother remarried, Mimi was abused by her stepfather. She would find respite every summer in Puerto Rico, where she went to spend time with her father. Her aunt was a seamstress, and Mimi loved to make clothes for her Barbies while sitting next to her as she sewed ball gowns and wedding dresses.
Mimi’s father bought her a sewing machine, and she took it back with her to Chicago, where her mother would buy her fabric. When she was thirteen, Mimi offered to make a dress for her mother to wear to a wedding. The end result was horrible—the dress’s hemline was off and it didn’t fit properly. Mimi’s mother wore it proudly anyway. Mimi was thrilled, and a seed was planted.
Unfortunately, Mimi’s home life became intolerable and she ran away, leaving the sewing machine behind.
Seeking year-round warmth, she used money she’d stolen from her mother to buy a train ticket to California, where a friend of hers had moved with his family a month before. “I thought that all of California was Hollywood.” She couldn’t understand the conductor over the loudspeaker. “I remember the conductor saying ‘something, something, California,’ so I got off the train. And it ended up leaving me in Pomona. And I was like, ‘This doesn’t look anything like the movies.’”
For eight or nine months, she lived in a city park, sleeping on a bench or with random people in exchange for money or food. She eventually made her way to her friend’s house and moved in.
The friend became a boyfriend. She experienced domestic violence there, too, and right before her sixteenth birthday, she found out she was pregnant. Upon hearing she was going to be a grandmother, Mimi’s mother came to visit and try to mend the rift between them. “She apologized, and I apologized. I think I had a greater understanding for my mom after I became a parent; I found myself in very similar predicaments.”
Eager to give her daughter, Chastidy, a safer living situation, Mimi moved out of the boyfriend’s house but wound up squatting in an abandoned apartment building with no running water. Her mother begged Mimi to let her take the baby until Mimi could get her life together. Reluctantly, she agreed.
Mimi married the first person she could, so she could get a house and bring her daughter home. Again she found herself in an abusive relationship. A second daughter, Lexi, followed in 1998, and Mimi tried to stick it out with her husband, but when Lexi was a few months old, Mimi asked some married friends if she could move in with them. She had a job as a receptionist and soon moved into her own one-bedroom apartment. She was making ends meet, but barely.
There were weeks where we would have a lot of potatoes or a lot of Top Ramen or whatever we could manage at that time. I would come home from work, go right into the bedroom, close the door, and cry. I felt I was drowning in whatever this life was. And the kids would cry, “Mom! Mom! Mom!” and I’d collect myself and go back into the kitchen and make dinner and move on, because that’s just what you do when you’re a mom.
Things started looking up. She found a job working as a receptionist at a 3-D digital media company for a man named Steve, who mentored her and educated her about his business. She got married again (“my healthiest relationship”), had two more children, and took up her old hobby, sewing.
Her husband turned the garage into a little sewing room for her. She’d wear some of her handmade clothes to the office and always get compliments. Her boss, Steve, who was always the first one to scream across the room, “She made that!” would often sit her down to talk about her ambitions and goals. One day, when they were having this conversation and he was asking yet again what she’d like to do besides be a receptionist, she replied, “I think I’d like to be a fashion designer.”
“How much would you need?” he asked. They talked further about what steps she would have to take to make her dream come true, and she went home.
The next day, she found a $30,000 check on her desk.
She started working on a collection and even had a runway show at the Fashion Business Institute in Los Angeles, but she realized soon enough that while she loved designing, she hated the other aspects of the job. Steve didn’t get upset. “You’ll figure it out,” he assured her.
In 2012, she noticed that a lot of people were starting sewing blogs and making commercial patterns and crafts at home. She thought, I can do that, so in March she started her fashion sewing blog, Mimi G Style. At the time, you could find online instructions to make a quilt or an apron, but there was nowhere to go where you could find out how to make the clothes you saw in magazines. “I would take something I had seen on the runway that of course I could not afford, modify it, and create something new.”
One day she made a skirt inspired by a piece she had seen from Oscar de la Renta. She posted it on the blog, and people went nuts, begging her to make one for them. Mimi wasn’t interested in sewing for hire, so she posted instructions on the blog. The requests persisted, however.
Finally, around Christmastime, when she was thinking about gifts for her daughters, she thought, What if I just take a couple of orders? So she posted that she would take orders for twenty-four hours. She priced the skirt high, at $198, to keep the number of orders low. And she warned people not to expect to get their skirt for four weeks. Then she went to bed.
When she woke up the next day, she had thousands of
dollars’ worth of orders.
She freaked out, sewed nonstop with her daughters cutting
and her husband folding next to her, delivered the skirts, and swore, “Never again.” Then she thought, What if I could just teach them to make it themselves?
She filmed a series of video lessons, showing people step- by-step how to create a garment from scratch based on their body measurements. She created one new video per month, and earnings rose so fast that in two years she was able to quit her job and focus on growing her business.
Meanwhile, “I was getting all these e-mails from everywhere in the world, from all these women saying, ‘I came across your blog and you inspired me to start a new hobby,’ or ‘You’re inspiring me to dress better,’ or ‘I just lost my job,’ ‘I’m going through a divorce,’ ‘I was thinking of committing suicide,’ or ‘I’m in rehab,’ and then saying things like, ‘Somehow your blog has helped me get through.’ At that moment, I realized that the blog was less about fashion and sewing and really was a vehicle of motivation.”
A friend who loved business books introduced Mimi to Crush It! in 2015.
By then, her blog was trucking along, she was developing her own products, and she had started her own line of commercial patterns. She was already using and loving social media, but reading the book showed her that there was still more she could do.
“OK, you turned your hobby into your career, it’s your passion, you’re working hard, but now you need to do more. Now you need to engage more. Now you need to crank up your customer service. Now you need to spend time asking all these questions and making sure that those followers and those fans really engage and become loyal to you. You need to keep building that community.”
For example, one day Mimi posted that she was going fabric shopping, and someone wrote that she would be willing to fly all the way from Tampa to go fabric shopping with her.
“I thought that was insane, but I moved the date by thirty days, and people came! And at the end of the day, they asked, ‘What are we doing next year?’ Next year?”
The next year, she booked a hotel, set up some classes, and about eighty people showed up. In 2017, the Mimi G Style Fashion Sewing & Style Conference celebrated its sixth anniversary. It’s followed by thousands of people on Facebook, Instagram, and Mimi’s blog.
Mimi has worked with about three hundred different brands by now, but she says the day she got a call from Project Runway was her greatest moment.
They were working on Project Runway Junior, and the kids were going to be using vintage patterns and turning them into a more modern look.
They contacted Simplicity [Pattern] because they knew that’s what I used, and asked if I could come on the show and be a mentor to the kids and introduce the challenge with Tim Gunn. And so the folks at Simplicity called me and said, “Hey, Project Runway called. They want you to come do the show,” and I was like, “What? Yeah, let’s do it!
When Mimi read Crush It!, she was excited to learn that there was a term for the type of business she was running—a reactionary business. She’s still at it, looking ahead to see where she should go next. She spotted a big hole and is now in the process of filling it.
In the sewing community, I’ve been able to cross all boundaries. I’ve been in every sewing magazine that there is. I’ve been very fortunate. But I’m Latina, and a lot of my community is African American or Latino, and when I looked in those sewing magazines, there’s nobody that represents us. I got to a point where I really wanted to see more of myself in these magazines, and I thought, Well, I’ll just do it myself. We launched Sew Sew Def, a digital multicultural sewing magazine that focuses on both men and women and will feature a lot of makers from all walks of life.
As soon as we launched it, it got a lot of amazing reviews. People were posting and sharing it because there wasn’t anything like that. And for me, I think that the more people I help, the more I get back. I’ve been very fortunate that I get to work with all of these brands, but not a lot of makers do, especially those who look like me. I know that there are so many, because they follow me, and I follow them and see their work. If I can bring awareness to them and get more of the brands that I work with to have a better representation of the entire sewing community, not just a part of the community, then I’ve done my job.
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