How "Grace and Grit" built Florida Fashionista empire.

I had fond memories of growing up, and we were— I grew up in a very poor family. We lived on a farm, lots of kids, didn't have money to buy new clothes. So my grandmother and I would go out garage sailing, and we would find clothes that I liked and that maybe didn't fit me, but her and my mom would fix them up to make them fit me. So she really instilled in me this kind of thrill of the hunt, find things that you don't have to pay full price for. So when we moved to Florida, I was like, I'm starting my life all over, essentially, is what it kind of felt like. And I just decided, let's do this thing. Let's start this business. I was doing what I had in my head, which was combining the luxury items. So think brands like Chanel and Gucci and Prada with your mid-market stuff. Your J.Crew, your Lululemon, stuff like that. You were either really high-end or you were that mid-market area. On top of it, nobody was doing furniture and home decor in the same store either. It was all clothing or all furniture. And I was like, why does this not exist? So as any entrepreneur understands, if you see a hole in the market, you plug that hole, you figure out how you can fill it. And I went, we're just gonna do this. And just one day started it. And here we are today.

My guest today has built one brilliant business already, started in 2011. And then she decided that she was gonna build another business based around her personal brand. She's an author of an amazing book called Grace and Grit. And we're gonna hear how she has managed to build one business and then a personal brand, and the one regret that she's got when she spent $25,000 on something. We're going to Naples, Florida. We are talking to Jennifer Johnson. Tell us then a little bit about the organization and the size, because you've built a very large business. Tell us a little bit more about the scale of the business.

So it started out very tiny. It was 1,800 square feet. Opened with a completely empty store. And story surrounding that, because I opened my business with a business partner and I didn't have the money at the time because I was trying to sell another business. She had the money, I had the brains. So we go into business together, we open with an empty store. People thought we were absolutely nuts. They're like, she's opening this store and there's no clothing in here. Within 2 weeks, we were full.

And that's people bringing merchandise or things that they don't want anymore. And what's the business model? Are you needing to give them cash when they bring it in, or are you holding on consignment and you sell it on their behalf?

We do a hybrid, so we do both. You can choose the cash option or you can choose the consignment option. So that's how we started the business, 1,800 square feet. 2 months into the business, my business partner comes knocking on my door at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night. She wants out of the business. We didn't have the money. Well, we ended up cashing out my husband's 401k. And my first clue should have been would not sign a non-compete. Literally the next day, she signed a lease on a space in the same center that we're in and opened up a store exactly the same as mine, took all of my employees except for one. At that time, I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen. I hired a consultant to come in to tell me that we were going to be fine because I didn't believe it. And honestly, the best thing that ever happened to the business, because after that, within a year, we had knocked out a wall, expanded to 3,600 square feet. So we doubled the size of the store. And then within a couple of years after that, we added another store within the same complex. Selling furniture and home decor. I looked at something that could have been a detriment. It could have been something that took us out completely, but I didn't let it. I put my foot to the gas and didn't look back. I put my blinders on and didn't pay attention to what she was doing, and I just did my thing.

Jennifer, what a brave story. And as you say, It's about mindset, isn't it? Whatever she has done will be between her and her maker, but fantastic that you persevered and frankly also that you had a husband who was full of support for you because another person might have decided to call it a day.

Oh yes, it was extremely stressful. The one tangible thing that got me through all of that, the most important part when you're in a, that's yours. Is to make sure that you're surrounding yourself with your personal board of directors. That's what I call it, my personal board of directors. It is people that are either paid, like my accountant and my attorney, or it's somebody that I know that was in business and is perhaps retired, or somebody that's currently in business that could help me with, hey, I want to sit down, that they'll mentor me. That is so important. Important that it, it's really a must in your business. It's a tool in your toolkit.

Yeah, we're going to talk a bit later on about your $25,000 investment that didn't go quite as planned, but won't get to that just yet. But so you expanded, you've got office furniture, you've got home furniture. How did you go about building the brand? Because you've said you've been able to expand great, but in, in a funny way unless you're an entrepreneur, you go, oh, they expanded, and you go, oh, that's fine. You kind of assume. But as an entrepreneur, I'm like, okay, but how did you expand? Because actually there's a story behind you needing to knock walls down. Presumably didn't knock the wall down that went to your old business partner's unit. I thought you, you might have thought about doing that, but presumably you, you, your attorney wouldn't let you do that. Exactly.

Yeah.

So how did you build the brand? And it is truefashionistas.com, by the way. And anyone on my that wants to go to my YouTube channel at The Unnoticed Entrepreneur will also see some of the screen shares. But truefashionistas.com is an amazingly content-rich and well-laid-out website as well. Jennifer, tell us about how you've built the brand and got people coming to you.

So I will tell you that it's one word: community. And what I mean by that is, is we planted ourselves within our community and just got involved. We dug our feet in, we grew roots here. So that would— that looks like many different things. That looks like, yes, we went out and we supported the Little League baseball games and the Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts and all of those things, but we were visible in our community. And that means I'm on the board of many different nonprofits in town. We do a lot of different philanthropic things with business in our community. We are here for our community. And as a result of that, people refer you because they come to know you. They know what you stand for. And they want to do business with somebody who is going to be a pillar in their community. And it was that one simple word, and it sounds simple. But with that came a lot of work. It came doing a lot of different things. For example, challenges that we face here in, in Naples, Florida is we have received, been on the receiving end of a lot of hurricanes over the last—

it's almost a byword for hurricanes, isn't it? Wherever you've either got alligators or hurricanes.

Exactly. We have become, with every hurricane that happens, a drop-off spot. For hurricane supplies for our community. But we don't just become a drop-off spot. We actually take it a step further and we go out and deliver in our company van the supplies that these people in the community that have been affected by the hurricane that they need. We make sure it gets to the people on the front lines. That's— I mean, it didn't start that way. We did it out of the kindness of our hearts. That's why we do it. But It's a community building thing again.

That's really lovely to hear. And of course, you're also fulfilling a community purpose, aren't you, by moving goods from people that don't need them anymore to people that do need them but wouldn't necessarily have the, the budget or the appetite to buy them. As you were a child, right? And I didn't grow up with a lot of money when we were kids. Um, we now have, of course, more and more thrift stores in the UK, but your model is really making it into a proper commercial enterprise, whereas in the UK thrift stores are really are a charity, whereas in America, it seems as though you have a real business model around the buying and selling of things.

Yeah. And we do, but we also have a philanthropic component of that. Because if you bring stuff into us that we don't take, for example, it may be out of season, or we don't sell this brand very well, we donate it to a local thrift store. And they get every single thing that we don't take. So we are still doing good in our community by giving it to that charity, who then in turn can sell it and make money for their charity.

Jennifer, that's really wonderful. And what you've also done through your hard work since moving to Florida is get a lot of media coverage. So you talk about community, but there's also been publicity in there. So for anybody that wants to go to fashionita.com, you can also see they have a press website and CNN, ABC, US News Time. You've got Gulf Shore Business, Best Life. So you've got national and I imagine regional and citywide press as well. Woman Home, for example. Can you just tell us a little bit, Jennifer, about your media outreach? Have you done that yourselves? Have just the media been customers and said, hey, this is a great story, tell me about it?

Sure. So all of what you see was all about cultivating relationships. That's ultimately what it was about. I met one reporter, somehow someone had given me an article or a request from a journalist. And I responded to that request and then I was published.. And then I used that to be like, hey, you know, in my, my emails or whatever it was, I put it on our website saying as seen on. And I just started building relationship after relationship. And then one person found out and another person found out. Blossomed. What started it.

Okay. And for people that aren't familiar, there are websites like it's called Help a Reporter Out, HARO, where journalists do send out what they're looking for. You can— that's by PR Newswire, if I'm not mistaken. And Jennifer, as you've done, once a journalist meets a reliable and credible source and one that writes back with good pictures and so on, they refer you to other journalists, don't they? So that's fantastic. So you've been able to build that relationship in the community plus with the journalist community as well. So plainly really great skills that you've got there. So let's just also look at some of the service aspects, because one of the things I love about your website is we've got a lot going on that would help the customer, be it bringing you the goods or buying the goods from you, to work with you. Can you just talk us through some of the strategy of, if you like, the on-site? Because I'm imagining a lot of a lot of customers are having their first interaction with you online.

Correct. So we try to make it as frictionless as possible, whether you're shopping the website or you're wanting to consign with us, because you can ship to us if you don't live by us. You can ship to us anywhere in the, the country. And for us wasn't all— it wasn't a white picket fence, right? We've mapped this all out and it's very easy for someone to do. Just sit and think about your business and what touchpoints you have with your customer. And from that, you can find and build a process around how am I going to make this easy for my customer to— because as we all know, the more barriers you put up for your customer, They're gonna stop and they're not gonna go further. So, you have to find out how to make it frictionless. And it just has come with a lot of time and a lot of looking at all of our processes. And we look at all of our processes at least twice a year and all of our positions. So, we go and we do an audit of every position in our company. And we have about 50 employees.

Yeah, when you say a position, you mean as in like a role or a job title?

Yes. And say, "What are you doing? Let me watch you work for an hour. Let's see the process. Is there something in the process that we had created that's a friction point, or is it something that an employee adapted over time?" Because we may say this is how we want it, but an employee maybe threw something else in because they thought it was a shortcut or they thought it was a good idea. And muddying the waters.

So for anyone that wants to go to fashionistas.com, you'll see what Jennifer has also got, for example, is a popup that gives you a 10% off your order, for example, straight away. And they have a rewards program as well. So not only have you reduced the friction, but you've got at least two hooks straight away that would either give me a reward or a loyalty of some kind. Jennifer, I'd have to ask you about AI because we talk about processes and AI and AI and automation is changing that. How have you changed or adopted AI within True Fashionistas?

Mainly, I use it more in my other business than I do in True Fashionistas. We use it sometimes to write an email write copy for a social media post or a— we not— we don't call them newsletters, but we send out emails several times a week. So we use it to craft copy, essentially. I know that a software that we use have been trying to use it for pricing purposes. And for us, the size of business that we are, we're— our store's about 13,000 square feet right now, and we probably have 300,000 products in our store. It's very hard to get an AI program right now at this stage that can price stuff. So we still rely on our old algorithms, which I guess is still kind of AI, but we mainly use it in True Fashionistas as copywriting.

Okay, so on the marketing side. Yes. So let's just think about what comes along because you've now started to transition and share what you know with other entrepreneurs. So we're going to move into sort of Jennifer Johnson Part 2, which is moving into her as a, as an author. She has an amazing book and she also has an amazing business with an academy coaching. So part of the reason I wanted Jennifer to come on the show is because she's one of those entrepreneurs that's transitioning from having one business to having a personal brand whilst retaining the original company. Very clever thing to do. Jennifer, take us through why you have started to migrate into your own brand.

First, a coach per se. And I've been told by so many people, you have so much knowledge up here, share that with other people. And for a long time, I was reluctant because again, I know people talk about that imposter syndrome, but it's a true thing. It doesn't matter how many businesses you've started or how much money you have in your bank account, people still feel that way. So I was feeling like, oh, I don't know, it's not time. And then all of a sudden I felt it. It became time for me to step outside that and stake my claim and say, I have a lot of knowledge that I can share with other people. I can help other people not have to go through all the pain that I went through trying to figure out how I was going to run these businesses is not for nothing. I can teach this to someone. I can teach this system. And that's really it.

Podcast. Without the legal case, I'm hoping. Yeah, yeah. Without the incarceration.

I mean, exactly. And I did the first season of my podcast, and that's really how my personal brand started. And after I got done with that first season, I felt empty. I felt like this is still not what I have up here, but I couldn't extract what I had up here and put it on paper or a website. I couldn't figure it out. The second season of my podcast was really when I realized, oh my gosh, this has to be all about small business. I mean, I talk about small business and entrepreneurship all of the time, and something just clicked. And then the layers kept being added on, and it was like a perfect symphony. After a while, something beautiful came out of it, and that's where my business is today. You have to be patient.

And you've got now a new website called at Jennifer Ann Johnson. Okay. And of course I'll put Jennifer's details and it is again, pretty in pink, luscious in pink. You have The Confident Entrepreneur and, you know, obviously I've got The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. So you have got the smarter, better name of shows because you're covering people, but also then you've built yourself into a new brand. Rather than talk about what you're teaching, which although that's important and valuable, we are gonna come to your $25,000 moment shortly, but I'd love to talk to you about what I've been terming this sort of constructive distancing. Because when an entrepreneur starts to move away from the company they founded, people inside the company and customers, especially as you played a large role in the community, start to wonder if there's something wrong even with the company, if you're not interested. How have you dealt with the degree of separation and how you make that happen without undermining the confidence in the first business?

So again, that was also messy. When I started out, I put baby steps. I put my toe in the water. I dipped it in just a little bit. And then it just started building from there. So it was a gradual thing. It wasn't like I'm done in the business. I'm not coming in ever again. I built it to the point it is now gradually, and I think that was the key because I still show up in my store a couple days a week for a few hours at a time. Because back when I initially started, I thought I could go all in. And so for a matter of about a month, I really didn't show up in my store at all. And that's when I realized, oh, I'm getting these questions like, did you sell the business? Does Jennifer even exist anymore? And that made me realize, okay, this needs to be a gradual process. It can't be something where I cold turkey and I'm done. And even to this day, 4 years later, I'm still coming into the store a couple days a week. I'm still present. I'm still here. I'm still around. It doesn't appear that I've completely walked away, I've completely abandoned ship. And I think that's the key. You have to, you still have to show up. For your original business, but yet leverage that your main business that you started is the reason why you can have your personal brand.

And presumably there's some succession planning as well. Otherwise there's a vacuum in the organization where the decisions you used to take on a day-to-day basis are needed to be made in just 2 or 3 days or hours that you're in the office.

Yeah, and that was probably the hardest part for me because it was separating myself, my identity, from my business. Because so many times as entrepreneurs, we are our business. And, you know, it's kind of like raising kids. That's how I think of it, is, you know, when your, your kids graduate from college and you've invested everything of your being into your children and they go off to college people, empty nesters, are often lost. They have no idea what to do. And that's very similar in having a business, is to step away and allow other people to— delegating is really the essence here, is you have to be able to delegate things that you did before to someone else and be okay with it being done 80% of how you would have done it.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So there is, as you say, this mindset change of letting go, and that the new team as well see it as an opportunity to fill in some of the space that, that you leave, right? And, and now you've got your book. How difficult was it to write Grace and Grit, which looks beautiful, by the way? Again, a pink number. We're certainly not Shy of using pink. Yeah. Was that something that you wrote yourself, or did you have a ghostwriter?

So I wrote it myself. I have a publisher, but I thought it would take longer. It took 9 months from sitting down writing it to actually having a copy in my hand and being able to sell it, which I don't know if that's quick or not. I think it's probably quick. The book is a part story. Of personal stories, yet combined with core values and with a twist of business. I started with— I have a background in— I have a history that I wanted to share with people, and it's overcoming a really significant challenge in my life. And that's what it was all going to be about. And it turned into, how did I get through that? Well, I got through that figuring out who I was as a person, à la my core values. And then how I got through the challenges in my business was very much the same. And so it weaved it all in beautifully to show people that with your core values, that can get you through so much.

And as you say, then that's probably why it didn't take so long because it was, it was ready to come out. Exactly. Now speaking of coming out, Jennifer, I am going to now touch on this lesson that you've learned, this $25,000 lesson? Tell us a little bit about that because, you know, I love to hear what other people have done that they've learned from. What would be that for you, this $25,000 ticket?

Again, I didn't think that I had the ability to do this marketing stuff on my own. And oh my gosh, I needed someone to tell me exactly how to do it. And I had found this company and been following them for a while. And went, okay, well, it looks like they have a lot of people who are behind them. That made me really go, wow, I really have to make sure that whatever I put my toe into, whether it's a coaching program or working with another company, I have to really vet them and make sure that they're going to work for me and I'm going to get out of it what they say. There's no empty promises. Big mistake. But you know what? I have this saying and one piece of advice.

Okay, well, yeah, we're gonna move on to your one tip as an entrepreneur. So why don't you segue for me without me having to ask the question, Jennifer?

There you go. That, out of that came the whole premise that things in life and in business don't happen to me. They happen for me. They are there to teach me a lesson. I just have to have the wherewithal to have my ears open to be able to listen. And I listened to the lesson that was being dealt to me at that time. And it was sure you vet everybody that you work with, don't take somebody's word for it. You do the work and you figure out if they're going to work for you. So things in life and business happen for you. They don't happen to you.

That's great, Jennifer. And I think this other thing about taking responsibility for your decisions, which you've done there and not beating yourself up. About it is also really important. Letting yourself say, well, it happened, I've learned, and I move on. And we've all spent money on something that we could have spent it somewhere else and maybe had a better result.

Yeah.

But you've moved on. So if there was a podcast and a book, we've got Grace and the Grit, so I'm going to put that in the, in the list, but I am going to press you to talk about another book or podcast that you might recommend.

So I'm going to go with book. It is called The Power of We, and Kyle McDowell is his name, is the gentleman who wrote the book. From that, it teaches you really how to build a culture within your company. And one takeaway from that book is when you know you're standing with your employees shoulder to shoulder and you're doing the same things that you're asking your employees to do, you're not asking them to do something that you're not going to do because If you stand with them shoulder to shoulder, there's not as far to fall. You're falling together and you're working together. You're working side by side. That was a powerful lesson to me. I've always operated my life like that. I'm not going to ask somebody to do something I'm not willing to do, but it put it in words for me and in a concept. And I went, wow, that's powerful.

That's The Power of We by Kyle McDowell. McDowell. So we'll look that up and put that in the, in the show notes. Jennifer, if someone wants to get more of you and your time, you have an academy, you have your book, you have your podcast. Where can they find you?

The easiest way is my website, which is jenniferannejohnson.com. I am also on Facebook. I'm heavily on Facebook. I'm also very much on LinkedIn as well. Jennifer Anne Johnson. On both of those platforms.

Jennifer, well, I'm connected with you now, and it's wonderful to be connected to a confident entrepreneur. I'm normally talking as the unnoticed entrepreneur, so it's been a joy to have you and to hear really your, your emphasis on community and that it starts with people, I think is wonderful, and that you're taking responsibility for the decisions that you've taken and that you're continuing to grow. Thank you for joining me all the way from, from Naples in Florida.

Thank you so much.

Jennifer Johnson, the True Fashionistas store that she's built there is incredible, and you can sell your merchandise or clothing to her from wherever you are in the country. Thank you for joining me. I'm the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Jennifer is the Confident Entrepreneur on this episode. Share this episode with a fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneur because this show is for you and for someone that you might know that needs the kind of wisdom that Jennifer has shared with us today. So until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.