It's time for the b a q a A b a q A what you say the b a q tip the day to b a q o no man Dad the b a q a A. It's time for Branni Vision question to answer. But you have questions myself and Mandy when she's here, has answers. Mandy's baby is not feeling so well. He was if you want to see, he made a little debut on our Wednesday show, but he just could not make it for the Friday show.
So it's just me today.
But if you have questions about personal finance, about career, about money, about business, entrepreneurship, just.
A life even, go ahead a slide in the d MS.
On our Ig Brown and Vision podcast, or email us at Brandavision Podcasts at gmail dot com. Because Mandy's not here, you know, I love Mandy's I don't love Mandy's out here, but I love when she is not here to do questions about this because y'all don't be asking enough business questions and I love to talk about business, and so I pulled some questions for my mentees. So y'all know, like I teach mentees, well, I have a MENTI program. Let me see how many people are my mentees right now?
I could tell you real quick, I could tell you about it, I could show you I think I want to say.
It's about four thousand.
Yes, yet four thousand, four hundred mentees currently signed up under my Patreon, mymntor Tiffany dot com. Most of them are women, especially women of color, especially black women, although I don't turn anyone away. And every month I teach a class, but every week they have meetups, they get them.
I give them tips and tools and lessons. It's been awesome.
So, like I said, it's about four thousand mentees currently as I'm taping, it's.
Twenty bucks a month.
It will not be twenty bucks a month by the end of this year, I promise you that. But if you lock in, you luck in se Yeah, my mentor Tiffany, if you want to be one of my mentees. And so questions get up. Get asked me about money all the time, so I felt like, you know what.
Let's talk about it.
So one question that comes up a lot is how do you fund a business, especially when you first start out. I actually talked this lesson to my mentee. Last month's lesson was literally how do you fund a business, and I identified four ways to fund business. So if you have a pen and pat pad, this would be great for you to start writing down. Okay, so let's talk about the four ways to self fund your dream business.
Okay. So number one is to generate revenue early. So what do I mean by that?
So you're going to focus on building a minimum viable product MVP. So one of my friends, daniell Leslie, always talks about this or like a basic version of your product or service.
So this is going to allow you to test the market with minimal investments. So what do I mean?
Lots of people will say like, oh my gosh, this is dressed. Everyone tells me the dress I'm wearing is so cute. I Am going to manufacture this dress. You know, you scrounge together some money, maybe you work over time and you scrounge. You get for five thousand and ten thousand dollars to you know, get the dress made. And now you have all these dresses and now you have to sell them. You don't want to do that. You want to think of a marketer. A marketer will say
I'm going to make one dress. I'm going to pick my pick my cutest friend and say, girl, put this dress on so I could post you on the socials, and I'm going to take pre orders for this dress because it's in the pre ordering. So let's just say, you know, I don't know a thousand people pre order the dress and the dresses ten, you know, ten dollars. So now you've made ten thousand dollars, and now you can use that money. That is, this is a way
to self fund. You print in that dress, use that money to go make the dresses, and you don't have to make any more any less because you know exactly how.
Many people want them. So generating early revenue is a great way to do pre orders or pre sales in your product. I did that for my book Happy Birthday Molly Moore.
So some of y'all know I wrote a children's book, and I remember, like I want to say, it costs me like four or five dollars to print each book and also maybe like another three dollars to mail them. And I was like, oh, child, it's gonna be a lot of money. And so what I did was a kickstarter, you know, to kind of like to do that early. And so we made seventy thousand dollars in Kickstarter and I was able to print and ship books as a
result of that. So Number one to self fund your own business is to generate revenue early by creating whatever the cheapest way to create a product or service and to create a pre order, pre sales, wait list, something that's going to generate some revenue before fully launching the business. Right, this is going to not only provide you with like early validation of your business idea, but generate some cash flow to fund your.
Future development and growth. Okay, does that make sense?
Like I said, some of the things you can use like a tool for that as like a kickstarter, or there's also these like you know, there's these gofundmeeds or like Indiegogo is one, or just take like I said, take pre orders of whatever the product or services you know, get people excited.
You have to create a landing page.
Yeah, So generate revenue early by saying here's something I'm creating. And a really great book for that is this book called Launch l A n U l A U n c H by Jeff Walker, because he is really the king of kind of like this, like generating buzz and excitement beforehand. Making money and then delivering that service or product later. Hey ba fan, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
Number two of self funding your own business is to.
Be your own bank via investing, and so investing in the stock market in particular you could fund your business can honestly be a viable strategy.
I've seen people do this.
It's important to approach it with careful consideration though and planning, because it's not something that you can just like, you know, jump out the window and do. Stock market investing can be key to generating business capital you need. So there are many ways to invest, but few as passively than the small stock market. So for example, one of my friends, she first started investing because she wanted to pay for vacations.
So while she was a vice principal of a school, my friend Terry, she would say, okay, I want to want on this vacation. It's going to cost me a thousand dollars. And she had learned to invest from her grandmother when she was in high school. So she would invest, buy something, watch it, sell it, and be like, oh my gosh, I made one thousand dollars.
Now I can go on vacation, but.
She quickly realized through that she could also use that to fund her business. And so Terry is currently my investing coach. What I love about Terry's at once she went to MIT, so she's super smart, but also too that she was a vice principal in education for ten years and she's been investing for over twenty years. And thus far she's taught about thirty five thousand students have
to invest. Some of them have made one thousand dollars in a day, ten thousand dollars in a day, some of her students not every day, but in a day.
And I have seen Terry herself. She did it publicly.
She did like a live once where she actually made twice, two or three times she's done this. That she made a trade that made her a million dollars. With that one trade she took three hundred thousand. I think that was with Disney or Amazon. She took three hundred thousand, made a trade which is when you buy a stock and then you sell it, and made a million dollars from that three hundred thousand.
I was like sold.
And so I know that the Budgetista has made me a significant amount of money y'all know, I've grown.
Wealth for myself, but it's been quite the grind.
And so what happens when I no longer want to do the business part of business? I asked my friend who was investing in real estate the same, and he was like, essentially he would have to sell his properties and then put his money to work in the market. And so what I want to do is before I get overworked and overwhelmed with the budgetistam and I want to learn how to navigate the market now so I can fund the things I want to fund, the business being one of them. Last year was a really, really,
really hard year. I want from you know, making multiple six figures to basically middle was seven figures in one business, to barely making like I think I made like eight hundred thousand in one of my businesses.
We're normally made multiple six, multiple seven. I'm sorry. And so I.
Imagine if I was proficient and investing in the marketplace, because last year the marketplace generated I think twenty was up twenty four to twenty six percent, so business was down, market was up. So imagine if I was proficient in that, I could have said, even though business is down, we gonna be all right because I'm in the market intentionally to fund my business. And so that's why I told myself this is the year, because last year, quite honestly, was scared.
I didn't know if I was gonna make it. So about the whole budget Liisa, I wasn't show if I was gonna make it.
And so we did. But a lot of my friends didn't make it. And I thought to myself, Okay, investing is a way to be my own bank, you know, because I'm not getting external funding, but I could be my own bank. And so one of the resources I offer up to you is that if you want to be your own bank, this is actually like this opportunity closes in like just a couple of days, because today's Friday, and I think Sunday the door's closed. I partnered with Terry,
my investment coach. She has this five day live investing master class. So I'm excited about it. And these five days you're going to learn how to understand the stock market. Day one all about indexes. Day two, this is what allows you to invest more passively. Day three, how to open a brokerage account, the exact exact account that you're going to need to invest. Day four to buy your first stock. We're going to buy our first stock. We don't have any money to buy your first stock.
That's okay.
We could do it paper with them, you can do simulation. And day five we're going to sell our first stock. And so this this five day investing master class. And what I decided to do is because I want company in doing this five day master class, that I added bonuses on top of Terry. So Terry has like, if you just want to do the live class April fifteenth to the nineteenth, Monday through Friday, two hours every day, eight pm to ten pm Eastern Standard time, it's ninety
seven dollars. If you want the replay and to get an extra bonus day with extra interviews as well, then it's two ninety four, I believe, and that gives you the replay access for six months and all these other bonuses. I'm stacking bonuses on top of those bonuses, and because I really want people to do it alongside with me, and that budget needs to stockbonuses dot com if you sign up for the class there, I'm going to give you an ebook.
If you sign up for the ninety seven dollars version.
So general admission, I'm going to give you two ebooks, one on learning to Earn, one on investing. I'm going to give you one month free to my online school,
the Livature Academy. I'm going to give you access to a pop up Facebook group that we're all going to work together while Terry is teaching, and I'm also going to do a live class learn to Earn class that's like a thousand dollars worth of value for anybody who does VIP that we will do it together because I'm trying to bribe you all to do it alongside me. And so that's at budget needs to stock bonuses dot com.
The link will be in the show notes. But yeah, that's so one of the ways if you if you have been thinking about what are the ways can I fund my business? One of them is through investing because it allows you to have access to money outside of what your business generates.
So that's two.
Third way to fund your business yourself is part time entrepreneur. Yes, you have to explore creative ways to bootstrap your business, like you know, offer your skills or expertise as a freelancer or consultant to generate additional income while building your business on the side. This is what I did when I used to when I started a budgetista, I also taught and I tutored, you know, and so that helped provide some fundamental base to pour into my business.
You know.
Look for flexible job opportunities that allow you to devote time and energy to your business off hours, because here's the thing that full time entrepreneurship takes typically time to get to.
Sometimes people are.
Entrepreneurship snobs, and I'm like, no, girl, Like, there's nothing wrong with having like uber eating, you know, there's nothing wrong with instacarting.
You know. Also to consider bortering goods and services.
So in the beginning, I used to barter, like, hey, I'll teach you, you know, I'll help you with your finding your budget if you help build my website, you know. So bartering also too, in exchange for products and services to help you launch or grow your business, and so some of the part time business resources. So consider, like I said, looking for ways to make additional income. Kudos if you can actually make additional income on the side that helps to enhance your skill set. I'll give you
an example. A friend of mine wanted to go into the retail space. She had like a clothing business, and she on the side used to work at T Mobile And at first I was like, girl, why are you working on a T mobile if you want to have this clothing brand.
She's like, I.
Wanted to work to understand retail, and so she worked on the retail side of T Mobile, like in the store selling products.
She wanted to be on the floor.
What does it look like to have employees that sell well, what does it look like to for merchandise to move? What does it look like to stock that? And she did that for two years. So she made extra money and she learned the retail side of a business, and I thought that was genius.
So that part time like a business model.
Like to make extra money on the side to fund your business while also learning something is like top tier. So look for examples and resources like upwork, freelancer five or Guru people per hour. These are places to make additional money on the side as you and you use that money to then fund your business. Okay, hey, ba fan, We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. So Number three ways to fund your Number four ways to fund your dream business, seek grants or contests.
So you're going to want to explore opportunities to win grants, Participate in startup contests, apply for small business competitions that offer funding. Right, So I'll give an example. My grant person on my team just applied for this grant. It was a lot of work for like one week, and it will generate us about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars just in the summertime.
And then in the fall aditional income. And it's a two year grand.
So you're looking at on the low end, this grant will generate about maybe like half a million dollars.
On a high end, maybe closer to a million.
And she's working on another grant right now that will generate about two point five million if we get it. That's tremendous two point five million on top of the half a million she's already generated us from grants. Now, here's the thing. If you're going to look at grants, you have to have underlying business fundamentals.
What's your P and L. If you don't know what that is, don't.
Apply for a grant. Right your profit and law statement. Do you have an accountant? Are your financials well organized, because they're going to ask about that.
What deliverables can you deliver?
I have my online school Deliveratary Academy, I've got like courses, I've got so you know what I mean. So the thing about grants and even contests are you have to be have the fundamentals of your business solidified. So many people couldn't get ppe loans why because they had not done their taxes in a number of years. And so when it comes time to actually get funded, people are not funding businesses without the underlying fundamentals.
There's fund and fundamentals. Does that make sense?
So you need to get that together before you seek out these grants. Quite honestly, I feel pretty confident about them. Multimillion dollar grant because last year only one person applied for it because people didn't even know it existed and most people were not ready. That is an amazing way to fund your business because most people are not going to take the time to be ready. They think they have a business. They're just making money. It's not the
same having a business. Is the fundamentals of your finances in order, your team structure, in order, do.
You have an org chart, who does what?
When you know, like that financial piece cannot be understated. Are you clear about your deliverables? What do you deliver to whom? Who is your audience? Sometimes it takes a couple of years to get together, but so but grants can be an excellent way, you know, and contexts can be an excellent way to make money for your business. And a lot of work to get it together. And then it doesn't mean that like the deliverable. So this
is how tight I've gotten in business. We're like if we get so we got the grant for the two fifty, right, So what's so great about that is that I have to basically teach. But I already put the APB out there earlier in the year to say, hey, if I have to have someone teach financial education in the state of New Jersey, are there teachers that are already teaching financial education? Y'all know, I got that law pass making a mandatory for middle school students, So there's already financial
education teachers. Seventy people submitted their resume, so YO were ready to go, depending on however many classrooms want to hire us. I have seventy teachers ready to go, and I know exactly what I'd pay them per classroom, and I know I'd be earning and the overhead is minimal at best. But do you see what happens when you're red D. You know you can apply for things that
are going to be a fit. We can make a tremendous amount of money with relatively low lift if you're red D. And so here's some things you have to consider if you're going to apply for grant and contests. You want to find opportunities to buy, building strong networks, cultivate relationships with mentors, advisors, and other entrepreneurs who can
provide guidance, support and potential opportunities. The opportunity that I just got for this is because a friend of a friend was like, girl, have you ever heard of such grant? I said no, and she said you should apply for We looked it up and we did and we got it. You know, so that networking is going to be important. Also, some resources to consider grants dot gov. This is a comprehensive database of grants are offered by various federal agencies
in the United States. You can search for grants by keyword agency eligibility criteria and so it can be competitive, but it's worth exploring, right. So also, there are many state and local government websites. Many state and local governments they're going to offer grant and financial assistance programs too small to support small businesses within their jurisdiction, so google
to look up these websites. So I would google like New Jersey's Economic Development Agency, you know, or local Chamber of convince converse for of commerce, sorry for like Tennessee, you know, and city government websites to learn about available grant programs and LA's but not least, you cannot sleep on your SVA. That is a Small Business Administration. They provide resources and assistanms for small businesses for stuff like
information about grants funding opportunities. The SBA doesn't usually offer grants themselves, but they do provide grants to It does provide way while well, it will provide grants to organizations that do support small businesses, if that makes sense, Like so a small build you want to look up like a small Business Development Center and a wiment's Business Development Center like though, the SBA will provide grants for those organizations if too, will in turn help you.
But like it's it's work, but I'd rather.
Do a week or two worth of hard work to make two point five million dollars and then hire people to do the work that I've been contracted for than to grind away for life, you know. And so just to quick recap the four ways to self fund your own business. Generate revenue early, pre sales, pre orders, okay, be your own investment bank by learning to invest yourself, you know, if you're interested in learning how to do that.
Starting next week, budgetisastock bonuses dot com right three part time on entrepreneuring, So working part time on the side as you grow your business, ideally in something that's going to teach you something to enhance your own business.
So you get paid to learn and for seek grants and contest.
But you have to have solid business fundamentals in place. You know, you don't have to be perfect, but you're going to ask for this paperwork in a time and manner, and so you want to have that stuff ready already. So here is another question I get all the time when it comes to business. This question is BUTANISA, BUTANISA, how.
Do I pivot?
So I was fortunate, So if you listen to the Wednesday show, you know that I was fortunate enough to go to this really intelligent young man. His name is Donald Miller, and he wrote this book called story Brand along along with the whole bunch of other books. But he is like one of the big thinkers in business. And so I won, like my team and I won a half day session with him, which is really great.
And one of the things why we needed to go meet with him is that I'm seeing a shift in business and I want to make sure that what I'm seeing. One I was like, isn't REALM really seeing this shift? And how do we pivot? Ideally, you don't even want to pivot. You want to pre pivot. Pre pivot means that like, typically you have to pivot in business when something happens and then.
You have to adjust.
Ideally, you don't want to have to adjust to external happenings. You want to adjust internally because you see something as coming.
Does that make sense.
I'm gonna say that again for those of you in the back. So ideally, the prepivot says, huh, I notice a slowdown in this In the marketplace that I'm in, people don't seem like I can see that everybody used
to wear heels. But if I look at like my cousins in high school, They're wearing heels less and less, and I feel like, although like I'm in the you know, right now, the girlies are still wearing their heels, but I sense that eventually, when these kids get older, they're not gonna be the heel game.
They're not gonna want to wear heels.
Let me start to do something now to internally shift so we are ready for when that shift actually comes externally. That's the pre pivot to pivot, at least for me, is when all of a sudden those kids grow up and they're not wearing heels. They're like, oh my god, our heel sales are down. We need to do something now now now. Now, that's pivoting and ideally, and some
people don't even pivot. They see that people are not wearing heels and they're like, ah, it'll pass, and then they become Blockbuster and Netflix take's over.
You don't want to do that at all. So what you really want to do is pre pivot.
So I've noticed some things in my industry that there is a slowdown, and Donald confirm those things. And then so we are currently in pre pivot mode of the underlying business that I'm in is certainly still teaching financial education, especially the women, especially the women of color. Right, that's still the underlying business, but how we do so is going to be pivoted tremendously. That will still be of service to all the women, but it'll look a little different.
And I'm excited about that, and I'll share that as we start to roll things out.
So how do you pivot in business?
Well, one, it is important that you're not always working on your business, you know, or you're not always working in your business that sometimes you're working external. So it's like, I imagine your business as your home, and if you're inside the house all the time, fixing all the water leak and this bus and and I mean, we do need to be inside the business sometimes, but it doesn't allow you to step up and.
Be like, wait, a storm is coming. Is that a hole in my roof?
Oh my gosh, it's the swing on the outside loose, Because then you don't get to really see what's happening holistically to your house.
So it is important that.
You take time to pull yourself out from working in your business, to pull yourself out and to look around and say the neighborhood in general is looking like this. I'm noticing that everyone is switching to this type of lawn. I'm noticing that the street, you know, needs to be paved. I'm noticing that, like you know, we're flooding a little bit more if something happening to the park next door.
Does that make sense that in order to pivot properly in business, that you have to take time to pull yourself out from working on in hands on day to day to kind of holistically take a look around, you know, And when you do that holistically take a look around, then it'll allows you to say, I notice a trend is coming, like everyone is switching over to this type of sighting.
I wonder why. Let me ask questions, Oh, because what is starting to rite in this community? What can I do?
Or I notice that everyone is taking out their oil tank in front? Why because the oil tanks are starting to leak? Oh my gosh, what do I need to do?
Does that make sense?
So like pulling yourself out, observing the external components of your business in the industry at large, and then hypothesizing of the direction you think it's going in. If you're not sure, that's Okay, because that's why you build network.
What do you see that's happening?
You know, you start to ask people in your network who are in similar businesses or not even like you know, like what do they see happening? Because some people are a little further ahead than you and they can see the forest for the trees, and so that's why I'm constantly asking questions and I'm like, ah, there is a shift in this space. Okay, what do I see happening with my community? About what they're really asking for? What are the people that I network would saying that they're
seeing happening and adjusting to that. And so the way you really pivot is to one understand that the business that you're in is not always going to be the business that you're in. I think I told the story about thiefs. I don't know if it was to y'all. I told them the story about Steve Jobs that an executive,
Jimmy Iveen, I think he was like CEO ORF. He might still be of Inner Scope Records rolled up on Steve Job was like, Yo, you cannot put a CD burner into this new MacBook prop Like the girls are already like streaming music, and we're losing money. We if you put a CD burner, they're not going to buy CDs, and the the the what Steve Jobs told them, He said, no business model is meant to last forever. Basically, child like, even if I don't do it, the girls is going
to burn CDs. So you're going to try to fight against progress or get ahead of it. Anyone who fights against progress like, oh no, I don't want to do that.
Okay, well girl, if you don't get ahead of it, then you gotta be left behind.
And so understanding one, the business model that you're in now is going to eventually shift. Everyone's shift, whether you're Disney, Lord and Taylor. If everyone has to pivot and shift multiple times in their business career, that's just how it goes.
You know, doing anything wrong.
Disney of nineteen sixties does not look Disney of twenty twenty four.
If Disney has to pivot and shift, so do you. That's just how it goes.
So release that like, I must be doing something bad now one understanding that everybody has to pivot and shift to spend time outside of your business looking around and asking questions, what is happening in the industry at large and identify some trends, and then look in your industry and identify the trend forward. What do I see based upon my expertise of working in this space and people
that I've talked to of where we're moving toward. And then that's number three and then number four to start to work on the new thing while maintaining and milking that part is critical. So if you think I'm going to shut down my business in the business model, no, no, I'm going to do what it requires for maintenance and milking. I'm going to squeeze as much money as I can of our current business model until I can anymore while building the new model. You know, that's still within the
framework and financial education. So by the time this is down, the new model will have map some money for money I have made the most I.
Could have here this new model.
Because I've given a year or two to get strong, we'll be ready to go and then will be into a new business model that maintaining and milking is critical. And then the last but not least, is to repeat again. Look outside your business understand that the model is going to have to change because nothing stays insane. Take a look around and say, what you know, where do I
see the trends going externally and internally? Maintain and milk what you're currently doing while simultaneously building the new thing.
And that's the That is.
How you pivot for success, or don't you know, get stuck in the thing, wait too late and everybody has surpassed you. I hope that helps. I love when we had business day. Do you like we have business day?
Y'all? Don't be asking no business questions? Ask them. I love answering business questions.
Yeah, like I said, you know, if you want to be my mentee, my mentor Tiffany dot com, yeah until next week. Wan't be here next week. I will until next week. We will see you on the beta qa A.
Oh, don't forget. Please leave us some reviews, you know, because we love a good review. We read them. You don't know, I don't know. I don't lend many knows how I look them up. We read them. Leave us a review.
If this was helpful, especially if you have somebody in business, forward this episode to them and say, girls, Tivity was reading us for filth over here when it came to business, and let me lay it down for y'all. You know, I've been in business for fifteen years, have made just about fifty million dollars in business in that fifteen years, and really in the last eight I would say most of that money was made.
You know. I've got podcast business, I had a.
Marketing business, influencer business, you know, best selling New York Times, best selling books, self published books, online community, online school. I've had a businesses and a wide range of things physical service, product and we've had success in just about all of them. And I've learned some things. So you know, I'm here, so I ask you a questions. Okay, talk to you next week, y'all.
Bye,