Welcome back to She Pivots. I'm Bea Dixon.
Welcome back to she Pivots, the podcast where we talk with women who dare to pivot out of one career and into something new and explore how their personal lives impacts these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. I'm delighted to welcome Beatrice or B Dixon to the podcast today. When I first interviewed B, I was blown away by the complexity of her life story. Her story was so layered. I did something I've never done before. I asked if
she would come back and do a second interview. So this episode that you're about to hear combines these two interviews into one chronological episode, covering everything from her start as a pharmacy technician to her cleaning business, to her personal experience with chronic bacterial vaginosis and how that inspired her to create the Honeypot Company. From an early age, B realized two things. One that she needed to have a strong work ethic, something she learned from her mother,
and two that she wanted to build wealth. With these two truths always in the back of her mind, B spent years living paycheck to paycheck, grinding it out, unsure of what her next step would be, and on top of that, she was dealing with her BV, an infection that just wouldn't go away no matter what she tried. Then something happened that changed everything. Her grandmother came to her in a dream and gave her the recipe for
a natural remedy for her BV. Having just come into her spirituality, b took this message from her grandmother, mixed up the potion, tried it, and for the first time in years, she found relief. True to her nature, she hustled and turned this dream into the Honeypot Company, the first plant based feminine care brand to be sold at
major retailers like Target, Whole Foods, and Walmart. Since launching in twenty fourteen, the company has grown into a multimillion dollar business, which has sold for a massive three hundred and eighty million dollars and is on the shelves of over thirty thousand stores. She earned a spot on Forbes's Top one hundred Female Founder's list and has been featured in Essence, Ink and Fast Company, and even Grace the Ted stage to talk about the power of listening to
your intuition. I'm excited for you all to hear be talk about the power of listening to yourself, building a business rooted in purpose, and how leaning into her spirituality has shaped not just her company, but her entire life. You won't want to miss this one, so let's get into it.
My name is Beatrice Dixon, and I am the CEO, chief Innovation Officer, and co founder of the Honeypot Company.
We're going to rewind. We're going to go back. Okay, where were you born, Where did you grow up? What was your family like? Like, tell us a little bit, Yeah, we're going way back.
I was born in Arlington, Virginia, and I was raised in the DMV area probably until I was like, I don't know, like ten, I think. And then we moved to Phoenix, Arizona because my mother fell in a manhole and broke her back, and her doctor told her the best place for her to live would be a place that didn't have a bunch of seasons, and so she chose Phoenix, and we moved to Phoenix, and so I was raised as a child to an adult in Phoenix, Arizona.
Your mom breaking her back feels like it must have been a pretty big event in your families.
It was. It was a massive event. She worked on a construction site. She was kind of like a nurse or like a medical aid on a construction site. And that particular day, because it was in Maryland, there was ice on the ground and somebody else had fell and slipped, and so she was called to go and get help the person who had fell and slipped. But then she fell slipped. It's not funny, but it's wild when you
think about it. And yeah, I mean she was down for a little while, she was paralyzed, she got she got several surgeries, not just one, and then you know, she made a full recovery. Like my mother walks, she does everything, but she will always have a ride in her back, you know, she will always have back shoes, you know. But she deals with it really well. She doesn't live on medication. She's not you know what I mean, Like she takes care of herself.
If you were so young, nine or ten, did that turn you into a caretaker? Like did that grow you up quickly?
It's funny. I never thought about it like that. I mean, I was there to help her because she was my mommy. She is my mommy. She's not a us. But I don't know that I looked at it as being a caretaker. I just looked at it as though, you know, it's your mom, Like what are you gonna do? My mother has always been like the ultimate hustler, rightly, She's always didn't matter what it was, she always found a way to survive, to take care of her family, to take
care of herself. But I did start working when I was like fourteen going on fifteen, and the reason for that was because I wanted to get my driving permit. And my mom was like, you know, that's cute, but I don't have money for you to go to driving school. And you're not getting the driving to permit unless you go to driving school. So if you want to go to driving school, then you have to pay for driving school. In order for you to do that, you got to
get a job. And so I got a job at McDonald's and I loved that job.
What about it?
I just loved that my mom had empowered me to go out into the world and make money from a young kid. I mean even in high school, I was in Future Business Leaders of America. You know what I'm saying, Like, I love being able to take care of myself and I have been that way since I was a kid. And I also love money, Like let's let's call the shit what it is, like, I love I love money,
and I love the ability. I love the ability to be able to go out into the world and make it, not just make it meaning just like cash, but just going out into the world and making it as a human being, you know, and surviving. I think because I saw my my mom was such a strong woman. It's such a strong woman, and I saw things that she was willing to do to make sure that we ate. And you know, that's just some stuff that you can't unlearn and that you have to respect. Like she did everything.
She cleaned hotels, she worked in the hospital. You know, sometimes she might have had to drop in on somebody to you know, like she just did whatever she had to do. You know, she did that. She work in laundry mats, she was a medical biller. She she just did everything. She did whatever she needed to do to
make sure we ate. Like when I was a baby, my mother had three jobs and she would literally come home between them, get a little bit of rest, like take a nap, wake up, go to work, come home, take a nap, eat, wake up, go to work like that, like it was just you know, and so.
Yeah, these mother's influence continued to be a motivating force for her. When it was time to graduate school and move on with her education, you followed the advice of her mother.
Look, I don't know about every other culture, but having a black mother, either you're gonna be a doctor, you're gonna work in the medical field, you're gonna work in law, you're gonna work in it was like, you need to choose a field that will never be obsolete. And so my mother conditioned me into that. At a young age, I thought that I wanted to go to school to be a doctor. But the only caveat was is I hated academia. I just did not like it. I didn't enjoy it. And so from a young age, if I'm
not passionate about something, I cannot do it. I just can't. And I'm lucky enough to have a mother that didn't force me to do things that I didn't want to do. Her thing was if you're not going to do that, then what are you going to do? Because if you're not going to school, but you're going to have a job because you can't live with me forever, right, So that was okay with me. That just meant that I had to work really hard. And then I worked in pharmacy and I did that for like ten years of
my life. But I knew being a pharmacy technician I would always have work. But then I kind of proceeded in working in hospitals and things like that until I moved to Atlanta when I went to work at an oncology pharmacy where I basically made chemotherapy drugs for chemo patients. And that was actually my last job in pharmacy technician work.
It didn't burn you out and it sounds very heavy.
That actually was like one of my favorite places to work because you got to interact with people and you got to face a version of mortality. And I think when people are terminally ill, you know, they look at life a little different. So got to talk to people all the time and hear their stories and see them fight, which I think is really it's so beautiful. It's hard
obviously because they're not well. That that part isn't beautiful, but the way that you look at your life and spend your time when you are potentially dying that is beautiful, you know, when you can be able to see that and experience that. So it was actually that was actually a really good time for me because I learned a lot,
you know. Even working in hospital pharmacy, you learned a lot, you know, because when you're working in a hospital as a pharmacy technician, you're seeing all kinds of things. Right. Sometimes you know, you might be servicing somebody that's like in the ICU, you could be servicing a child that's sick. You can be you know, there's just.
A lot, you know.
So it was heavy. It was heavy, and I think that I got to a place where I've always been a natural born healer, which makes sense when you look at my work life, even where you look at where I went after I left working in the world of pharmacy, I think I just needed You're right, I needed something else.
So Be made her first pivot and left the medical field. She knew deep within her that there was more out there for her to explore, but she also wanted to enjoy life.
I wanted to work within wellness in a different way. I wanted to figure out how to heal people, but not necessarily from a Western medical point of view. Even though I deeply believe in Western medicine because I think that it's necessary, right, I also think that the other side is necessary too. And I think that even though I was a young person and I was like really enjoying my life living in Atlanta, you know, this was a very very very fun time in Atlanta in two
thousand and five to two thousand. It was like crazy fun and I was out till like three o'clock in the morning. I would have to be to work at eight. I got to experience that, and it was beautiful. But in order for you to be entrepreneurial, you have to have a strong work ethic. And so I think that that part of my life was the get your work
ethic in line, get that together. I think that that's the phase that I was in, and so, you know, I think I went from work ethic to how do I make my own money and not have to necessarily punch somebody's clock.
Eventually be founded her first pivot into entrepreneurship.
And then I remember, like, you know, I was on my way out from working at the pharmacy, and I remember me and my friends would just hang out with some people and they were talking about how they needed to get their house clean, and I was like, well, I think clean your house, pay me, I'll do it. And me and my best friend and we just did it. And it was like, oh, well, we could probably do this. So then we started a cleaning business, and then that
became what I did. That was my entry way into entrepreneurship.
We had figured out how to work on her own time, but between her social life and the unpredictability of cleaning, she was struggling to make ends meet.
You know, we had been cleaning houses for a while, but we weren't able to make our rent. We got evicted, didn't have a place to live, but we had like, we had really cool clients. So sometimes our clients would let us stay. Sometimes our friend, you know, my one of my best friends, Rachel, she would let us, you know,
sleep on her couch. Sometimes we would literally clean people's house to get a Motil six or like Motil six ish, it wasn't always Motil six, but like we never like lived on the street, but we didn't have anywhere to live. And that that on for a couple of months. But that right there was the moment that I was like, I gotta get it together. That was when I was like, this can't be my life. It was the beginning of when it was like, this can't be my life. And
then we met. We were cleaning this guy's house and he was telling us, you know, pretty wealthy guy, and he was telling us how he needed to find somebody to rent one of his houses. And he was like, you know, if you know anybody, let me know. You know, I don't really need a ton of money. I just want somebody in there. It's going to take care of it. And so we ended up being able to rent that
person's house. Maybe it was like fifteen hundred dollars a month, which isn't a lot of money for the type of house this was. I mean, this house was absolutely beautiful. And I think once we got into that house, maybe we had lived in another place right before that, but once we moved into that house, it was during that time that I was like, I got to change my life.
Change didn't happen overnight for me. She slowly started to shift the puzzle pieces of her life, changing her scene, picking up more odd jobs, and finding her way to her spirituality through a Lakumi reading. Her friend invited her too and.
I went and got myself in reading and it was beautiful and it really kind of just changed my life and it made me wonder what it would be like to potentially practice the spirituality, and so that came into my life. So there was a lot of things that were changing and ebbing and flowing, and you know, I was just in the next phase of whatever that was.
And then I started working at Whole Foods and I really enjoyed that work so literally, I remember I was working at Whole Foods and there would be brands and companies that would come in all the time, and they would like come in and they bring their reps or sometimes it would be the owners of the brand, and they talked to you about what they did and why it works and why it's so, and sometimes Whole Foods
would send us on immersions. So one of the biggest immersions that I remember was when I went to the Gya Farms because Gaya is like one of my favorite herb supplement companies, right, and so I'm doing all this work and I'm like, I want to do this, like I think I could do this, And that was when I got the itch. That was when I was like I want to do this. I could have a brand. I didn't know what the brand was going to be, but I was like, I could totally have a brand.
That's when the second itch, entrepreneurial itch, came into play, because I knew that I couldn't be in the service business because from my point of view, the type of service that I did, the only time I was making money was when I was serving people. I needed to be in the I make money in my sleep business, and I learned quickly that that was through products.
When we come back, Bee walks us through just how her personal medical issues and spirituality inspired what was to become her multi million dollar business, the Honeypot Company. Stay tuned. Before the break, we left off with b dreaming of something bigger for herself, a way to make money in her sleep. She knew there was something more out there for her, and the stars finally aligned when she searched inward for a way to heal her BV. So.
I was dealing with bacchio vaginosis for like a year almost, and it was really bad, Like it was like I stink up the car bed, I stink up the bathroom bed, like I just walked in went to go pee. It was very embarrassing, a lot of shame, and I was trying everything. I was like living on Google. I was living on Google forums. I was like wrapping garlic with cheesecloth and like sewing tampon streams on and like putting that in. I was like freezing yogurt and an applicator
and tampon applicators. I was living on antibiotics. It was wild. So my microbiome was shot. And then I was trying all of these like old wives tale type of recipes.
It was bad.
And then one morning my mom had moved with me to Atlanta and we had a cute little house, and one morning I was having this dream. It felt like a dream, but it wasn't a dream. It was you know, in the morning, right when you're in that really beautiful sleep, like the sun is starting to come up and you're just like in a really beautiful, very relaxed, you're in that kind of rim sleep, and your consciousness at that
time in the morning is a bit high. And so my grandmother, who I never met in this life because she died when my mother was a child, she came and she told me it was wild because she looks just I look just like her, even more than my mother. I look the spinning image. If you saw pictures of my grandmother, I am the spinning image of her. And so I remember us looking a lot alike. And I remember her telling me that she had been walking with me and she saw me struggling, and she knew what
to do. And she handed me piece of paper and had a list of ingredients, and she told me that this was going to solve my problem because she she's one of my guides too, obviously, and she had been seeing all that I had been doing for that year. And she handed me a piece of paper and it had this list of ingredients and a lot. The wild thing, Emily, is that a lot of the ingredients were a lot of the things that I was doing singularly. But what the problem was was I needed to put them all
together and make a potion. And she told me to memorize the paper, and so literally I just kept repeating the ingredients over and over again, and I literally woke up saying out side of vinegar, lavender, rose garlet like I literally woke up saying that, and I wrote it down and I went to work because I worked, and hope foods obviously, and I bought all this stuff and I went home that night and I made myself whatever this was, I didn't know what it was going to turn into.
We tried different measurements and concoctions before she finally found it. She tested it out and like magic, her grandmother's gift to her work.
And once it did what it did for me, I was like, Oh, this is it. This is what I was supposed to be doing. So I very much knew that I wanted to be in the consumer packaged good space. The other reason why I knew it is because I worked in the service business. I used to clean people's houses, I organized. I mean, we talked about this, right, I did everything that you can imagine, but I knew that that was not the way to make money for me. Where the only time I make money is if I
do a service. I knew that I wanted to make money in my sleep, and what's the best way to do that is through products? And so yeah, like my brain was doing on I want to do this. And the wild thing is I was dead broke, like I was living check to check, you know, Like, how was I going to start a brand? I wasn't even thinking about. But I knew that I could do it somehow, some way, you know. And then my granny came man, and here we are.
Timing is everything, and context is im So I want to contextualize whereb was both personally and spiritually. We briefly mentioned be spirituality, but when everything changed for her was when she was most connected to her new faith.
So I had just initiated into Santadi or Lukumi, and so, you know, and that initiation is pretty It's it's serious, you know, like you shave off all your hair, you wear white for a year, you do that, you know, you really go in. And the way that our spirituality works is you can't do anything without content without It's like you your ancestors. Then the spirits, right, like it's like anything that you do, you call them in first. And so I think I was pretty wide open. The
women in my family are intuitively gifted. I believe that all of us are, right. I think I think every human is. The the ones in my family, though we have tended to really cater to that part of them, and so it's really just kind of a thing that's just in my blood. I think that when it comes to the relationship that I have with my ancestors, it's actually a part of my spirituality, which means that it's
by nature, it's just the part of me. And that's obvious, right because if it wasn't for them, I would not be here. And so paying respect to them is really important, but also understanding that their bodies aren't here, but their soul and their spirit were definitely still very connected. Like I know that my grandmother is one of my guides. I know that my father is actually like my protector in a way. When he was alive, he was like six foot four. Now my father's like twelve feet tall.
That's how tall his spirit is, you know. And so and he's like always here always, He's like my security guard. And it's not like a thing where I'm like talking to him often or anything, but like, wh when something like this comes up, he's here, Like I feel him, just like I'm here talking to y'all. His energy is right next to me. But yeah, like I was definitely open for her to be able to come in as clear as she did. And not only that, I was in a bad way because I you know, I had
BV constantly. You know, some of that was probably hormonal. Some of it was probably because I was just going through so much at that time, you know what I mean.
I love this idea that the personal had to come first, that the honey pot company would not have existed without it. But I had to know how did be think of it? Did she see the business opportunity that she had been looking for all along? Right away?
It wasn't like we the business kind of energy. It was like, shit, if this could work for me, this could work for other people. That's what it was like. It was like I was remembering those Google forms that I was living on, and I was remembering remembering all those humans with vaginas that I was talking to. I mean, these forums had thousands of women on them. It was wild. So it was more so remembering those things and knowing that there was a white space.
So how did you start? How did you get the capital to have the supplies? How did you start selling?
It?
Sounds like you probably knew where to find the market.
For a year and a half, we didn't do anything right. I had went to my brother's side to help because I didn't know anything about business. Not for real, He's so smart, he knew I mean he went to business school, right. He went to schoolbyas CPA, you know, and so he was a person who had the business savvy that I knew. He didn't know about CpG business consumer package goods, right, And I went to him and I was like, you know, I need help with this thing. But I can't just
put this out into the world. I have to, like, it wouldn't be responsible to just like that day, figure out that this had worked for me and then take that same exact formula and start selling that. Like, you can't do that. You have to test it. You have to make sure that it's the right because it's not like my grandmother was able to tell me use a cup of this, she used a teaspoon of that. It was like, here's the ingredients. You're going to know how to figure it out. Figure it out because she knew
I had worked in ivy rooms. As a pharmacy technician, you have to know maths, right. There's different problems that you I mean, anytime you're batching a medicine or whatever, you have to know what's the dose of a milligram whatever the milligrams is that you need to pull out of that vial so that you can put it into that iv bag, right, and then you do that, You put it in the syringe, You put the ivy bag,
and you put it in front of a pharmacist. They check your math, they do everything, and they sign off, and then you put it in the bag. So she knew that I knew how to do that. She knew I knew how to compound skincare because I had done that, you know. But I also knew that it would have been irresponsible to just go out into the world with a formula that I had only tried on myself. And so I went to side and I was like, I
need help. And he was like, since I have my own business, I'm an accountant, I'm not a I don't know anything about vaginas except what I know about vagina's like and I was like, I get it, but I need help, Please help me. And so he did. You know, he was there. He helped me in all the ways that I needed help. So he gave me like this five hundred dollars credit card.
You know.
Eventually he became my co founder, right. I think then I knew in my mind that he was my co founder, but he wasn't thinking about it like that. He gave me this credit card they had five hundred dollar ballance on it, and so that's what I used. I would buy products to make the product, and then I would make different type of versions and that I would just give away. And then we did that for like a year and a half and then somebody was like, hey,
you should launch this at the Brown Brother's hairshell. And I didn't know about the Brown Brother's Hair show. That was my first time ever hearing about it. And I went to side again and I was like, hey, I really want to do this thing. He was like, we don't have the money to do that thing, Like this little five hundred I'm giving you every month, like that's a lot of money, because it is, but like we don't have the cash. And I got on my hands and knees literally and I was like, Simon, please, I
really feel like this is a thing. And he was like okay. And I think these were the moments where things were really they were real. But this is when things were becoming really real because he went found like twenty thousand dollars. He pulled it together with some of his money and one of our friends' money, and that's how we bought bottles, caps, labels, the shrink wrap. We were using hair dryers. It was wild, you know, ingredients and we made it as simily line and we like
made all these we made like six hundred bottles. We had to get banners and you know, just all the things you need to go to a trade show. And I told him, I was like, if this doesn't work, I will never bother you about this again. I will never say anything. I will never come toy like I promise. But at worked. We sold six hundred bottles in a weekend that we made ourselves with our hands, in our friend's hands, and that was really the beginning.
Getting the validation she needed from the trade show. Be leaned in and did everything she could to grow the Honeypot company. But it wasn't always easy. She was still working full time as a buyer for whole Foods, and not to mention, she was actually married at this time, and unfortunately not happily.
I was just grinding. I had to survive, I had to eat, I had to pay bills. Was starttarting, you know, with starting Honeypot, and you know, and I didn't even know what that meant, with starting honeypot man. I wasn't thinking necessarily about what it could be. I just knew that it could be something beautiful, and at that moment, I just wanted other people to be able to experience the healing that I was able to experience for myself.
You know.
So you know, so like it was a hard time. You know, I was in a interesting marriage. I was. I wasn't happy with myself. I was very overweight, you know, I was. I just wasn't in a great place. What's the point of being successful if you're not happy? That shit is stupid? Like why am I killing myself to be successful? And I'm not happy inside my body? I'm not happy inside my mind. I'm not happy inside this marriage. I'm not you know what I mean, Like those two
don't go together for me. This is all for me. I don't mean this for anybody that's listening to this. You know. This is just my story, my woes, my feelings. So I don't want anybody to hear this and take offense to what I just said. But that's how I felt as it related to myself, and so I needed to get it together because I remember me and my mom. I was going to the doctor to figure out if
I could get pregnant or not. And the doctor found some issues with my thyroid, and my mom was like, we don't have thyroid problems in our family, Like, girl, what are you talking about? And it's an old wives tale that if you have thyroid issues, that you're lying about something. And so what was the thing that I was lying about? That I was tremendously, tremendously unhappy in my marriage. It was not serving me. It just wasn't good. It just it wasn't good. But I was afraid to leave.
And I remember my mom telling me. She basically was like, but she gonna die, Like what are you doing? Like we could drive home right now and we could get into a car accident and die, And would you be happy with your life if me and you were to die right now? And nobody had ever put that shit so eloquently to me before. Nobody had ever said that to me before. I had never even thought about enjoying
every moment of my life. You hear about people say that, but like when you're not in a good place, you know, those kinds of sayings just kind of roll off your back. But the way that my mother put it to me. It just contextualized everything. It was like I just woke up. It was like I was asleep and she poured some water on me, and I woke up, and I think, you know, within weeks I had told my then husband that I couldn't do this any more. I just I
kind of did a one eighty in my life. I just started getting it together because I just couldn't do it anymore. I just I couldn't do it anymore. But yeah, so business came first because it had to come first, because the opportunities had presented themselves.
And soon Bee's biggest opportunity landed on her doorstep, from none other than the Silver Bullet for any product Target, I want to kind of build out. How did the deal with Target change things?
Oh, like night and day, it was wild. You have to realize, before we got into Target, all we made was washes, and then we worked with companies that sold wash and sold pads and sold you know, and sold baby care part We were just selling all kinds of stuff on our website. And so when Target reached out, we knew because we have been doing like just trying to test a bunch of theories and test a bunch
of products and see what was gonna work. We knew by this time what was gonna work because we had like eight x our website, because that was really the only place we were doing business. We were in retailers, but it wasn't you know, we were technically in whole foods, but we were only in one store of whole foods. We were in a bunch of like small shops, you know, co ops, natural food markets. Why were we in those places because I was a broker at the time and
I was servicing those places. And so when Target reached out, we were able to get some prototypes made because we knew by this moment that we needed to be more than just a wash business. We actually needed to be a vagina business. And so that's what we set out to do, and we hired a branding agency. We essentially like went to a place that does like prototype for packaging, and we proto typed a brand that was washing wipes
and pads. The other thing to know, Emily, is that that had never happened before, No brand had ever crossed the aisle before. And so we ended up getting eleven hundred doors of Target with our washes and our wipes, and then within six months we were able to get our minstrel our herbal menstrual pads in into like fifty stores. It changed everything one because we had to go out and raise a lot of money, which the amount we raised,
If you asked me, was that a lot of money? Now, I would tell you no, But at that time it felt like a fortune because I had never even seen that amount of money. And so the changes were we had to raise money. Target came out of nowhere. Gratefully. Our buyer had went to get her hair done and her hairdresser was because because the other thing that we did too is we used we used hair shows as
a way to market our products. Makes sense, right because there's nothing but humans with vagina's walking around and so because of that, she heard about us through her hairdresser and that's how she reached out. She went to our website and she reached out on our support email. It was it was crazy and so yeah, like that, but
it changed everything. We went from making the washes in our kitchen to working with the manufacturer, which meant that we had to we were running a whole different operational type of system and business because I mean all we made was washes. We didn't understand how to work with a manufacturer. We had to raise money. We had never worked with a branding agency, not one that was gonna take it to the next level, you know what I mean. Like we were going into wipes and paths, which those
are two separate types of businesses. Washes and wipes are cosmetics. Paths are our medical device. Like so many things change, but it's good. Change is good.
The honey Pot company began to grow and grow, making bees dreams of both helping other women experience the same healing she experienced and to make money in her sleep a reality. After the break, Bee talks candidly about how she strategically grew her company and how she strategically sold her company. More soon, you built this incredible business and then you started looking to sell.
Yeah, I mean the moment we took venture capital money is when we knew we would have to see Listen, in the beginning, the type of investors you have are typically probably going to be friends and families, angels. They call it friends and family, but that doesn't mean that they're your friend or your family. It's just like around that's like just private people investing in your business. Then your business grows. Now you need money that has some
intelligence behind it. You don't just need money, you need know how. And so you go to a venture capitalist that specializes in consumer package goods. Then you need to go back out into the market again and raise more money. This time you're probably going with like private equity, which is like even stronger know how because you're probably when
you're looking for growth money. You know, that doesn't mean that private equity can't typically invest with growth, but growth money typically can look like venture capital money because they can typically get an earlier. Private equity money is more like you're like, you know, you've done about ten million dollars in sales and you're ready for that next phase. Now you're looking at getting from ten to one hundred, right, And so you know, those types of investors can't just invest.
They have to invest, and then they have to know how to help you. Because what your business is when it's at ten is different from a business that's even at twenty or fifty. It definitely looks night and day than one hundred million dollar business. And so also though when you get in business, and like I said, and when you take venture VC money or you take PE money. They typically have investors that invest in their portfolios. They're called LPs, but they have to give their LPs a
return on their money. They're not like an angel that can be around. That may be a person who saved their money their whole life, or they've been able to be successful in business, but you know, and they just want to put their money to work. No, these are like licensed investors and they come with rules. So that's why the type of PE money that we took, they
can't even invest. They can't even look in your direction unless you've done ten million dollars in sales, unless you've got there's just there's levels to it, there's rules to it, and you have to be able to scratch off most
of those boxes. They may be able to look past a couple of rules, but they're looking past it because they know that you're probably going to be reaching whatever the numbers are, whatever the rules are of engagement, right and so, but because of that, because of them being accredited and licensed and all the things, their fund has
to turn over within four years or five years. And so if you're going to take that kind of money, then that means that you are signing up to either sell or ipo and that that's just the way that it goes because they have to see a return.
Was that a hard reality for you when you came to that realization or you've torn them accept up by that point, No.
It wasn't. It wasn't a hard reality for me at all, because I know that that's typically the way that you're going to find your wealth. You can get wealthy founding a company and holding it forever. It just takes time and it can be a risk because anything can happen. You know. It's hard to get to wealth and be a small business. And a small business is anything under ninety million dollars. That's what the SBA considers to be
a small business. And then when you're in the medium sized business, that's a really hard place to be because now you're not the newest thing on the block, you know, so now you're trying to get from like your one hundred plus to a billion or half a billion. These are really hard numbers to hit. These are hard things to do, you know, and the business is just different every time you're hitting these different milestones, and so you really have to know how to continue to scale and
that's what conglomerates are there for. I mean, you know, conglomerates aren't specializing in innovation. The way that they innovate is they acquire businesses. That's just the way that it's always been. So it's not hard for me because honey pot is my life's work. I'm not reaching for a success only for money. And you have a business so that you can make money, so that you can so that you can create wealth for you and your family. I mean that, let's call the spade what it is.
And I don't want to be a slave to this for the rest of my life, and you don't have to be. But it's hard work doing this work. And if you do it the way that me and my team do it, we give this everything everything. I give this everything that I have. You know, I've given it everything that I have and you know, and so it has to pay me back, it has to it has to make me whole, and you know that. And that's
the way that it is. So no, it doesn't. It doesn't freak me out, it doesn't scare me because I understand the rules of engagement, you know, and I know that the reason why you go into business is to create wealth for yourself, and that's what I'm doing it for, and to serve humanity, like it's it's not only that, right, But yeah, how did.
You learn these rules of the road. It seems like something you can't but you can't intuitively know. I didn't intuitively know. I had no idea.
I didn't even know this is a thing like I. You know, I remember the first time we did a pitch like, I was so nervous. I had no idea. I had never asked anybody for real money before. I never even conceived of you know, I thought real money was a million dollars. I remember I wrote a check for myself for a million dollars and I and I
posted it. I put it on my ceiling. I thought at one moment, because you know, all I had ever made when I worked in the workforce was like, what fifty sixty thousand dollars a year, which isn't a lot of money. But I thought I was doing okay for me making a lot of money. Man, I was making one hundred and fifty thousand. Until you get to make one hundred and fifty thousand a year and then you realize that actually isn't as much money as you think
it is. Then you make your million dollars and you realize that actually isn't as much money as you think it is. Because the more you make, the more your lifestyle increases. And if you're a person who's like me, who's a giver, I'm not just taking care of me. And so I don't know, Like I think, you just learn as you go. You just flow through it. I had no idea how to do most of these things, you know, but I have my brother, had my team,
I had investors, and you just learn. You just thumb through it.
Something I really admired was about how honest you are about your commitment to building wealth.
Yeah.
Sometimes I think about, like for women, that we often feel required to build something meaningful and making the profit and like success is that kind of secondary to it?
So now they go hand in hand.
Yeah, tell me more about Like you know, you speak candidly about the attention to make money.
One of the indicators that you're doing well is money. It's finance. We get into business to do what when we go to work every day? What do we go to work for to make money? Any company that is
that is experiencing success or not experiencing success. It takes a lot to run that business, especially if it's a business that came from nothing, which every single business in the world at some point did come from nothing, right, And so if you're going to sacrifice your time, your money, sometimes your health, your nervous system, your brain, your relationships, time away from your family, it should be in service of you being in a position for that thing to
make you wealthy. Like that, there's nothing wrong with that. Like I believe that what we should do should be changing the world, and at the same time, the humans that are building it should be able to experience a level of financial freedom. That doesn't mean that every single human that's working on it is going to become a millionaire, but hopefully they become one hundred thousandaires. That's why every human at our company holds equity because that's very important
to us. If you work on this thing, you should share in the benefit of this thing. And we do what we do to make money. We are a for profit business. You can't be broke and be trying to do and build one of the you know, greatest companies in personal care. If that is your goal, which that is our goal. That is my goal. I want honey pots to be here for the next hundred years, two hundred years, as long as it can be, so that even when I'm long gone, it's always here in service
of the humans of humans with vaginas. Right. But in order for us to do that, we have to be financially successful. You can't have one without the other.
And can we talk about how you found the right partner to sell to? Like what those factors were? I had read that you had rejected offers that were hired.
Yeah, yeah, so what were the factors there? Didn't want to sell our soul? Yeah, didn't want to sell our soul. I you know, while personally I can only speak for my two shoes, you ask my partners, they'd probably tell you a different thing. Because there's a big part of me, like part of me knows that I have to do the part of doing this work has to be for the finding is right, Like we have to be successful
because the revolution has to be financed. Shout out to Emmitt Dennis who says that all the time, right, you can't be successful and not be making bread. You just can't, because that's how you continue to have success. But that's a small part of why I do what I do personally. The biggest part is that we are here to be the change in the world that we live in. Being that we make products for people's bodies, we have to be responsible with how we do that. We have to
do that with love, with care. We have to treat each other well within Honeypot so that that reflects out into the world. I just believe that when it comes to finding a partner, it cannot just be for the money. And that's not just partnership as far as like going into acquisition. That's even just with investors. When you are shopping for investors, there's periods of time where you most of the time for us, you know, it was like
desperate situations. Desperate situations can make you do shit that's not very smart. Where you sign on investors or people who aren't really great for you. Hopefully you can be in a position to get those people out. But once you do. Business with somebody, y'all go together, right because they're not going anywhere. They're on your cap table. And being that this acquisition wasn't a full acquisition, it was a majority acquisition.
Whoever we partnered with they were going to own majority of the business, so they had to be doing that with our best interest at heart. Our best interest at heart is the community that works within honey Pot and the community that we serve in the world. We have to be in service of those two things.
What is one thing that you look back on now and at the time you saw it as a real low point, and now you see it as having really positioned you to where you are now.
I think the first time we were raising money, I was again I can only speak for my two shoes. I was working a job. I was a broker, which meant that I liked so I sold food for a living to retailers, food and products. I was living on the road, probably three to four weeks out of the month. We had a business. I mean we were making six figures. It wasn't like a massive business, but we had a business. We were making the product, we were shipping it out.
We had no fulfillment. So I was working, we were making product, we were shipping product, we were raising money, and we were raising that money literally to pay bills because we had gotten into target. It was wild. I was so unhappy. My mental health was not great, and when you mix that with the exhaustion of just what my life was. I wasn't in a relationship that was serving me at all. If anything, it was taken away from me. It just was a really really, really really
low time. And I don't necessarily know, I don't know that my answer is precisely what you asked me. But being able to be that low was really good for me because I knew what bottom was, you know, And I believe when you know what bottom is, you know there's only what's only what's left, it's up. And I at that time, obviously I didn't understand that because I
was at bottom. But I'm so grateful for that moment because when I finally got to the place where I realized the relationship that I was in was hell, and I got the courage to end it, and that was the beginning of our scale point. That was where we were on our way to scale at that moment. And normally when you're on the way to scale, that's when shit is real tough, especially if you're a company that's doing it bootstrapping. But you know, that moment was necessary.
I mean, I will never forget that moment in my life.
So I think our version of success changes for ourselves at different points in our lives. What is your version of success for yourself right now? Like, what does success look.
Like right now? That's relative, you know, and personally, my version of success is being able to be present. Is being able to have a calm nervous system. Is being able to be physically fit and work out five days a week if I wanted to. Is being able to eat really well. It's being really happy in my relationship, first to myself, been to my partner. Is being able to be in beautiful relationship with my friends and family. Also to be in beautiful relationship with the humans that
I work with, because they're my friends too. I think professionally, it's being able to have a beautiful flow state with my team where we are just moving and flowing and growing and executing and working together, and really being able to intentionally connect to the humans that we're serving and intentionally make them beautiful products, intentionally continue to make the things that we already make better. I don't say this with ego, but I believe the honeypot was a gift
to the world is a gift to the world. I believe the work that we do is very sacred, it's very spiritual, it's very tapped in, and especially because we really do the shit that we do, Like it's like we don't say the things that we do to make it seem like it's deeper than what it is. Like we really do believe the things that we do. We really believe in them. You know. We put a lot of effort and intention and love and really beautiful energy into this work, into these products,
into how just the whole curation of the thing. It's just not a thing that we take lightly. And part of why we don't take it so lightly is because it was a gift from my ancestors. It's really beautiful work that we get to do at Honeypot, and you know, and I just have a lot of respect for that. I have a lot of respect for the humans that choose to use our products and put them on their body and in their vagina and on their vagina and wash with our things. And it just means so much.
I mean, this part of the body is how we are all here. When you think about that, shit is wild. So it just deserves, you know, the beautiful things. We're not only in vaginal care anymore. We've gone into personal care with body watches, and you'll see some more body products coming out through Amazon and online in the coming year.
But like, we really are doing some really dope stuff and we get to do that, and I'm just grateful for that to be able to get to do these things and to be successful and to be profitable, and to like, there's so many companies that are not getting to do those things, and I just want my guides, my ancestors, my customers, you, the people that listen to this show that maybe never even tried our products or heard about them. I just want you to know how grateful I am to be able to do this work.
It is a gift, and thank you so much for having me that that's also a gift. So I'm very grateful.
Thank you. You've heard so with us. Thank you so much. It's so great to talk to you. B is still working to expand her brand to empower women through wellness and entrepreneurship. Be and her team continue to push boundaries and redefine what's possible for women's health. If you want to keep up with all the incredible things Be is doing, you can follow her on Instagram at i amb Dixon and check out the Honeypot Company at the Honeypot Co. Talk to you next time. Thanks for listening to this
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