Looking Back to Look Forward 100TH EPISODE! With Michelle McKenzie S7. Ep. 9
Looking Back to Look Forward 100TH EPISODE! With Michelle McKenzie S7. Ep. 9
Hello, WTF podcast listeners, welcome to the 100 episode of the WTF podcast. Woo hoo hoo!!!!!!
I am so excited for this milestone moment and I am so grateful for those of you who have been with me from the beginning, and those of you who just discovered the podcast. I appreciate you.
This episode will be a look back to the very beginning of the podcast. To the origin story of how the podcast started. I remound the clock to the very first episode with Funlay Alabi, co-founder and CEO of the Shea Radiance beauty brand, who is the inspiration for the podcast and the very first guest and her business partner, Francesca Opoku, who we made a cheer-up video for (which inspired the idea for the podcast) when she was feeling down about being unable to secure funding for some distribution expansion plans her and Funlayo were about to embark on. also inspired the start enough to podcast.
For those of you who are new, you will get to hear the OG music and my then cohost, who I started with for the first season. We were very green and our audio quality wasn't great. The audio might not have been stellar back then, but I assure you that the quality of the conversations has been and is currently top tier.
Looking back reminded me of how we started and where I am now, 100 episodes later. We started with very little knowledge of podcasting, but a big desire to use our voices, to shine light on the challenges and triumphs of black entrepreneurs and black women and dropping yours in particular to access capital to scale and grow their businesses. There were many times I wanted to stop but I am glad I didn’t and kept going to this milestone.
In this episode we discuss:
- How to prepare for product distribution expansion in large distribution stores (especially for beauty brands)
- Lesson learned from early failures
- How to use your why as your north star to remain resilient when things get tough (inevitably, it will)
- The importance of collaboration over competition and how to collaborate with others to better compete against bigger competition, especially if you are a small indie beauty brand
Here are the links to the first two episodes with Funlayo and Francesca if you want to go back and listen to them in their entirety, imperfect audio and all.
S1 Ep. 1: Entrepreneurship is a Marathon, Not a Sprint with Funlayo Alabi
Check out the new podcast website where you can find all 7 seasons of the podcast: https://wheres-the-funding.onpodium.co/. If you like this podcast, let me and others know by writing a review on the podcast website here. Please sign up to join the mailing list to get informed with new episodes and blogs drop and get access to the e-book that I am collaborating with Kutloano Skosana of the Shades and Layers podcast to produce to share lesson we have learned from speaking with almost two hundred entrepreneurs and investors on our podcasts. You don’t want to miss this when it drops so sign up for my email list here.
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During the ep
