The Fastest Way To Become The Person Who Runs The Business of Your Dreams with Stephanie Cartin of Entreprenista
22 Jan 2024 · 40 min
Stephanie Cartin quit her corporate job in May 2012 to co-found Social Fly, then built Entreprenista to give women founders access to PR, networking, and education. Members have landed GMA features, podcast opportunities, and million-dollar introductions through the community.
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Hey everyone. Welcome back to the earn your happy podcast. I'm so excited to introduce you to Stephanie Carton. She is the co founder of Social Fly which is an award winning social first digital and influencer marketing agency. She's also the co founder of Entrepreneista and the Entrepreneista podcast. She's also an angel investor and on this episode, you're not going to want to miss it. Don't fast forward because we talk about the fastest ways to grow your business and become the person who has the life and business of your dreams. We also talk about how how her entrepreneur community was born. It was born out of one question. How did you do it? I know that we all ask that. That is the question we're all trying to figure out. And she truly is after my own heart with believing the same beliefs that I have around everything you need being one connection and one community away. So if you're feeling like you're struggling alone as an entrepreneur, this truly is the episode for you because we're going to talk exactly how to find the places that are going to pl you in. So let's get started. Stephanie, welcome to earn your Happy. I'm so excited to have you on the show.
I am so excited to sit down with you, Laurie. Thank you.
I say this almost every interview, but it's the fun of the 20 minutes prior to hitting record. And with you I was like, oh my gosh, yes. I've gotten, I've gotten to talk to you before this. We've had an intro before this. We had a great call even before afford this one. But I can definitely tell we were just saying we would be fast friends if we lived in the same arena. Area. Arena, whatever. Same area. But it's so much fun when you meet other people who kind of have the same background and the same passions. And you and I are both extremely passionate about having community while building a business, creating communities and collaborating. Like we spent the last 20 minutes going, okay, how can we help each other? What would this look like? What feels fun? What you know, let's talk about your event, my event. And that'll happen in 20 minutes. And I just love when that happens and I do believe that that is hap what happens when you find a similar community. And so it's not just about, you know, oh, I reached out to this woman online. She looks like she's doing something similar. There are actual large communities where the whole group is like minded and that is so cool. And we're going to go deep on talking about that, because you are one of the co founders of Entrepreneurista, which. Tell me about that. Because when I heard that a bunch of my friends were in it, I was like, tell me more. Who are these women?
Oh my gosh. Yes. So Entrepreneurista is a community for women founders and leaders and we have all of the best business tools, resources, connection, education, support. Really everything that my business partner Courtney and I wish we had. When we started our first business, we put everything together under one platform, under one roof, just so it could be just a little bit easier to build a business. Because as you know, Lori, building a business is so hard and it is not for the faint of heart. There are so many ups and downs and challenges and being able to have a community that you can literally just send a quick message to let them know what's going on, what you need and get an instant response. There's nothing better when you're trying to build.
It is everything. Otherwise you have a lot of days that go by where you're sitting there without an answer and those questions just keep stacking up and you feel behind, behind, behind where with a community. I'm telling it's you get in these communities and you get these sub communities and you're on text messages or you're in. I know that you have a channel that you can be in where you can chat with everybody. It's being able to put that question out and get pretty much immediate answers from things. Or I got a guy, I got someone, I've got a woman. Like, I've got this person who can help you with that. Absolutely. Game changing. Especially when it comes to the things that are not your zone of genius. Like for me, things on the back end, setting up systems, flows, all of those things in your business. Like, that is not my zone of genius. I need to know teams who have done this before, who have, you know, been tried and true and it's, it saves you so much time. And let's not let, let's talk about the money it saves you. So you've, you've built multiple businesses before this one. We are going to talk a lot about entreprene in just a second. But you've built multiple businesses. Tell me about that journey. Were you an entrepreneur before this? Like, how did that all come about?
Yes, if you count selling Girl Scout cookies at the age of, you know, eight years old. I've been an entrepreneurista my whole life. No, but seriously, I got, I'd my first taste selling Girl Scout cookies and I remember being the Top seller, one of the top sellers. And I was like, wow, this is so amazing. People want these cookies and then people buy them. And I just remember going from Girl Scout cookies as a little kid to friendship bracelets and finding all of these things that were trending as a kid and then wanting to sell them. And so I feel like I just like had it and neatly in me now. Fast forward to college. I went to Cornell University and back then when Facebook first came out, it was only available to Ivy League colleges back then and it was called the facebook.com and I remember, I remember thinking, I started, you know, I got an account, I started using it within that first year. I was thinking, you know, this is going to change everything I'm learning about in college because I started to see, you know, that some businesses were starting to get involved and everything I was learning in marketing, I'm like, this is all going to change. So I became obsessed with social media very early on when it first started fast forward. I graduated from college, I worked in sales and marketing for a few years and I had friends who were starting businesses and they started asking me, you know, for help with sales and marketing strategies. And I was saying to them, you know, you really need to focus on social media. This is going to be the way of the future if you want to be able to reach your ideal customer and talk to your customers. So I started putting social media strategies together on the side of my full time job and Courtney and I ended up partnering together. And after we, you know, started having success with some clients early on for about 10 months, doing it on the side of our full time jobs, we said to each other, you know, if this is going to be an actual business, we have to go all in and do it or not do it at all. So we did what any young 20 somethings would do. We quit our corporate jobs on the same day, which was May 4th of 2012. We'll never forget that day. And you know, we never looked back. And we grew and scaled our marketing agency Social Fly over the past 11 plus years, really practicing what we preach. And you know, we were always focused on our own marketing strategy for our agency business. So we were quickly number one on Google for social media and influencer Agency many years ago and started winning awards for our work. And what started to happen was because of the quick growth of Social Fly, so many other women founders started reaching out to us for help and advice and wanting feedback. And that ended up being how the entrepreneurist podcast was born so we could actually share all of that advice at scale. So that's how Social Fly and Entrepreneur first started. It was early as our podcast.
Wow. Okay, so it sounds like things went pretty quickly for you. How long of a span was that?
So we started social fly 11 plus years ago now. So this past May was 11 years ago. So I guess it's been almost 11 and a half years. Yeah.
An 11 and a half year overnight success.
Yes. So great long journey.
It's funny because once I heard of you like this last probably. What was that? Three, four months ago? I can't unhear about you. So I love, I love when that happens, when it's like, where, what? Where'd they come from? Oh, they took 11 years to get to this point where people are, you know, talking about them all the time, which is so cool. So you probably say this joke, but the 4th was really with you.
Yes, exactly. Every year on May 4th. Yes.
So great.
We celebrate, we celebrate everything now on May 4th. So we're doing our big event this year on that weekend of May 4th. So we're always doing a celebration. We launched the Entrepreneurista League a few years ago on May 4th as well. So we do everything on that date.
Now this is your lucky Star wars days.
Yes.
I love it so much. Okay, so let's talk about why. Like, why community though? Why do women need it? I know we touched on it a little bit, but I want you to actually go deeper into what it looks like in those moments where most people quit. And what do you see in the community? How do you stop that? What is the culture like in the community? Tell me all the things.
Yeah, absolutely. So the biggest thing in our community is everyone is there to help and support each other. I always share, you know, there is enough business to go around for absolutely everyone. There are millions of women entrepreneurs and there's millions of people in the United States alone. There's so much business available and opportunity out there. So we are all able to support each other and help each other, give referrals, give feedback. We're only going to continue to be able to lift each other up by doing that. You know, we have about half of our community has service based businesses. The other half of our community has product based businesses. We also have people, of course, with tech companies and nonprofits as well, and everything in between. So, of course, you know, on the service based business side, you're going to see multiple website developers or, you know, we have lots of marketing agency and business agency owners. And that's okay because everyone can actually connect and collaborate. And not everyone specializes in the same thing. So we're all able to refer business to each other, which is really, really nice. And like you said, really just having people to turn to when you need that help, but also when you want to celebrate something. So we actually have a room in our community platform that's called Celebrate. Because we all are going through so much every single day in business. It is so hard that we have to remember when something really great happens, like, let's stop and celebrate it and share with everyone so we all know what's going on. Because otherwise it can be so lonely. Like so many, so many women are solo founders. So feeling like you're working from home and you're alone and you don't have someone to talk to every single day. Like, I love being able to have this conversation with you right now because we've probably both just been on, you know, zoom calls, you know, all day long. And here we are now being able to really collaborate. I've been alone in my home office all day long. So feeling like you have more people to talk to and connect with and learn from. There's definitely nothing better.
Okay, so one of the questions I feel like might be on people's mind about community and just growing your network because I know you get this all the time. Where do you find these women? You know, where can we connect with these women? Okay. And you tell them these different communities and they can look at them and even join them. And sometimes if we don't join them with an intention or understand, you're not going to get the value out of it. 2026 is the year that you launch your business. It's the year that you've become the boss. You become the leader. That idea that you have that has been eating at you forever that just will not leave you alone is going to come to life. Maybe it's something that someone tells you you should always sell or a store you've already designed in your head. And with Shopify, 2026 is when you finally make it happen. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person. Millions of entrepreneurs have already made from household name to first time business owners. Just getting started, you guys. I use Shopify for glossy and I remember when they sent me my little shopping bag celebrating my 10,000 sales and I literally cried because I was so scared to take the leap. And I'm so glad that I did and that I use Shopify. It gives you all the tools to easily build your dream store. You can choose from hundreds of beautiful templates that you can customize to match your brand setup is fast with Shopify's built in AI tools that write product descriptions and headlines and help you edit photos so marketing is built into you can create email and social campaigns that reach customers wherever they scroll. So as you grow, Shopify grows with you. You can handle more orders, expand to new markets, and do it all from the Same dashboard in 2026. Stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com happy go to shopify.com happy that shopify.com happy hear your first judging this new year with Shopify by your side. Too many people finish their workday feeling frustrated, drained and unfulfilled. I know that. I have experienced that myself. And the good news is it doesn't have to be this way and you don't need a new job to fix it. Patrick Lencioni, author of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team and more than a dozen other bestsellers, created the Working Genius assessment to help you pinpoint the kind of work that gives you energy, the kind that lights you up, and it also shares the kind that drains it. So over a million people, including me, have taken it and completely changed how I lead and show up every day. If you're a CEO, an entrepreneur, or someone who just wants to level up in business and in life, working genius is going to give you the clarity and confidence to operate in your strengths and find greater joy in what you do. Because confidence isn't pretending to be good at everything, it's knowing where you're truly gifted. Take the Working Genius assessment today and get 20 off with code earn@working genius.com that's working genius.com you'll be glad you did it. I would love for you to talk about when you see people successful in your community, how do they come in? With what intention? How do they use the community? And then I'm going to touch on after that. Just some like etiquette that I wish more people new. Nothing bad but like it would be helpful to know these things going into these communities. So let's start with what's the best intention to move forward with and how do we use the community best to get the results of the people who are performing the best in it?
Yes, I love that. Okay, so the first thing to keep in mind is what success looks like to one person might be different than another person. So some people might be joining our community in particular specifically because they really Want to meet new people and they want to be surrounded by other founders. And it's very easy to do that in the community. We have virtual networking, in person networking. Everyone can easily connect and network in the platform, and that might be what success looks like to one person, to someone else. They might want to join the community. We have a lot of PR and press opportunities for members of our community. So some people join the community just because they want to get on our podcast or they want to get featured on Entrepreneista. They want access to, you know, the PRN podcast room in our platform, where everyone's having each other as guests on each other's podcast. Some people join the community because they want access to all the discounts we have on different business tools and solutions. So what success can look like for one person might be different than another person. If you want to be able to do absolutely everything in our community, you can. But I find sometimes people say, like, you know, I don't have enough time to be in a community. You know, I'm so busy doing all these other things, I don't have time. And really, you might just need to do one or two things that might not take up a lot of time, but can get the results that you're looking for. Because you might just be looking for some press opportunities. And all you have to do is pop into the press room that we have and the. And the PR room or the podcast room and share that you're looking for these opportunities, and then you get those opportunities. It doesn't mean you need to be logged in 247 to the platform and doing all of these things. Right. But other people might be looking for a new business and they want to make relationships and share what they do in their business or what their services. So they're top of mind to get referrals. So the answer is, Lori, like, it really depends on what success looks like to you. But if you share with us and our team, like, what are your business goals? What are you looking to accomplish? We can then share with you. Okay, here's the best ways to utilize the platform. Utilize the community so you can get those results. And we have new member meetings every single month where members can come and share exactly that, what they're looking for in their business and will help guide them to really get that support that they need. I will share one other thing.
Do it.
What's very important to think about as you're meeting and networking with other members is it's not necessarily I'll put in Quotes like, about, like networking, right? It's about building real meaningful connections. So if you go on a connection call with someone, learn about that other person, what's important to them, what does success look like for them, who are ideal customers or clients for them. So they can be top of mind for you as you're going about and meeting other people too, and vice versa. And if you genuinely like people and you generally care about people and you genuinely want to connect, you will be successful because again, there's enough business to go around for everyone ever wants to share and help each other with referrals, connections, resources. And everyone wins and rises each other up.
This has been such an important thing for me to learn throughout all of the. You know, I, I've, I'm trying to think of when I first joined a mastermind, but I think it was like 2016 or something like that was in going into them, you know, I didn't even really know what they were, how to show up in them. And I remember I knew they were so valuable and they were because people were just having like I would have mind blowing experiences on the in person things, but I didn't know how to use the community. And it really overwhel me because I thought I had to show up for everybody and like do all the things for everyone and like answer every post that was in Facebook. And so I ended up like not using it at all because I just, it freaked me out. And I hear this from women a lot like that they're like, oh, it's overwhelming for me. I feel like I'm not getting the value from communities. And so it's going in with the intention that you just talked about of, okay, you know what? I'm gonna find maybe one or two people that I know I can help because some people go on like benders. They'll go like, I'm setting up 10 calls with 10 people from, you know, the community. And some people love that they thrive. But if you see that happening, it doesn't mean that has to be your style of connection. It's like going in and knowing who you are and what your style of connection is. And you and I were just talking, you and me are a little bit more like we're extroverted introverts. So we like more one on one. We like to put our energy to less people. Like I'd rather do more energy to less people than spread it out. So like you said, going in and going, okay, my intention is to grow podcasts and beyond podcasts. I'm going to go in specifically do that. I'm going to look for those people and then I'm going to pop out. So it sounds like in the community, some of the main things that people go in there for, if you could just touch on, like, this is perfect for people. If you, you know, have a podcast, you want to grow it. If you have a membership, you have a court, like, tell me about those people.
Yeah, definitely. So we have created our community to have, have everything you need at all stages of your business. So if you're just starting your business or you're thinking about starting your business, we have the resources that you need from, you know, the education to learn about best practices for marketing strategy, legal, finance, how to build a budget. And all of those recordings are in our community platform. So everything we've done for the past two and a half years since we launched the community, that's all in there. We also, again, if you're just starting your business, we have lots of discounts on all of the best business tools and resources, things that you need to sign up for when you're starting your business. So that's all in the community platform. You have access to it. We do weekly virtual learning and networking events. So those are all live on Zoom. So if you want to come and show up and virtually network and connect and learn at these events, you can absolutely do that. But again, we record everything so there's no pressure to have to come live. You can always watch things later, but again, if you don't have time and you don't want to watch the things, you don't have to watch them. It's totally up to you again, based on what's most important to you. If you're looking for press for your business or you're looking to build yourself as a thought leader, we have lots of opportunities to really help get your business out there in our community. We have writers for Forbes and Entrepreneur and other media outlets that are part of our community. They're in our community and they're always looking for people to feature in their articles. So you just have to show up in those, those PR rooms and share that you're looking for opportunities or respond to those opportunities as they come up. All of our members, we also feature on entrepreneurista.com and a beautiful profile piece. So if you're looking for that feature, maybe it's your first press piece or maybe you're doing a new launch in your business and you want a new press piece and get those backlinks back to your website. Which is very important. That's one of the ways that we, we're able to grow social fly in the early days. We're essentially giving people everything that we figured out and wish we had when we started social fly so that that's all available as well. And office hours. So we host office hours with incredible founders who have grown and scaled huge businesses. They come to share their expertise with the community and you can come ask any questions live on those office hours. So we've had office hours with founders like Michelle Cordo Grant. She's the founder of Lively. We've had office hours. We're about to actually. Yeah, yeah. By the time this episode comes out, we'll just had Adriana's office hours. She's the founder of the Little words project. These awesome bracelets. If you know Adriana, she grew her business again bootstrap business from absolutely nothing. Started in her parents basement and now has I think over 10 stores is sold in. Target grew this huge, huge company. And these women want to share what they've learned and they want to give back and they want to help founders who have questions like, how do you get into Target like, like come talk to Adriana at office hours so you could hear all of her secrets and, and really how she's done it. So all of this is available in the community. And you know, we've had so many members that, you know, joined when we first launched the community two and a half years ago and they were like solo founders and now have grown businesses where they have five, 10 employees bootstrapped from all of the connections and resources that they've been able to get from the community. And just seeing that happen has just been the most incredible, incredible thing. And they're now giving back and helping some of the founders who are joining now who might just be starting their business. So again, whether you've just started your business or you've grown a huge company and you're looking for connection and community, we have all of those resources in the platform.
It's so great because building a business is really, you're building your team. Like even if you're a solopreneur, it's like, like your team doesn't mean it's everyone on your actual physical team. Your team is like, I need to look around and know that this player has my back and this person has my back and this woman has my back and they have my answer. Like now that I look around in my life, I'm so grateful that I took the networking cue that what kept on being pumped on these podcasts and in these books, it's like, no, you need to surround yourself with these people because I would never have gotten anywhere. Because you absolutely have to have those people and those conversations that you can go and access because you are 100.
Correct.
You don't know. It is so hard that in the best way. Right? I never want to make it be like, it's so hard. It's not worth it.
It's.
It's so challenging in the best way. It's like the best personal development of your life and you get to meet this incredible woman on the other side of the challenges. But you will quit because you will think it's only happening to you. You will think the problems are only. You're only getting punched in the gut ten times a day. No, we all are. We're all arena. And it makes it more fun knowing that you're, you know, your bestie is getting punched too. It's great. So, so let's talk a little bit about, just for a hot second about, like, what are some etiquettes when we go in there? Because I know in the early days of creating these communities, once in a while I'd be like, oh, God, like, don't do that in the community. Oh, no one's gonna want to help you with that if you do it that way. Oh, you can't come in and just take and then bail. Like, tell me some of the things of what you see really work amazing. And like, how women integrate into.
Well, yes, I love that. So being authentic and real in the community is how you're going to see the most success. So what that means is showing up, sharing who you are. And I always say, givers gain, right? So offer something of value. It doesn't have to be, oh, I'm giving you, you know, a three hour free social media consultation. But it can be. Hey, I wanted to share this article. I thought this was really relevant that you might be interested in. You know, Pinterest just shared their top trends for 2024, and I thought this could be a value to everyone in the group. So giving always is definitely something that for me has been super important. I'm naturally a giver. That's just how I am. So that comes authentically naturally to me. So what that means is not showing up and saying, hey, is anyone looking for my services today? Like, you can buy them right here. Like, that's not how you want to show up in the community. You want to show up and be a real person. So introduce Yourself in the introduce yourself section. Share more about yourself like who you are as a person. And of course you can talk about your business and what you offer. So you're top of mind, but you don't need, you don't need to sell people on your actual service. You just need to be you and show up. Because then when someone is looking for your service or your type of product, you're top of mind for them. So that's my first step.
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You can totally ask. And, you know, I see all the time members, like, when they're launching, you know, a new product or they have a drop, of course, go in there and post about it and share and tell everyone, like, hey, just launched this new product and posted about it on Instagram. Here's the link. I would love for you to go give it some love on Instagram. And actually, if you want to buy it for yourself or your friends, like, here's an entrepreneur code. Go use it. Like, you could totally do those things. Absolutely. I just share, like, don't just post that as your very first post. When you go into the community, let people know who you are first and build those, like, real, genuine connections. And what I love seeing happening in the community is, is, you know, a lot of our members, they do get together for, like, coffee chats, like we're having right now on Zoom. They get to know each other, they learn about each other. So then when people are posting, we have a. A room that's called In Search of. So people are always posting in there. Does anyone have a recommendation for a marketing agency? A lawyer, an accountant, a bookkeeper, an intro to someone at Target, whatever someone needs. And, you know, feel free to post those at any time. But what you'll see is, is members are recommending other members who now they've gotten to know in the community. Like, hey, if you're looking for a bookkeeper, go reach out to Aaron. She's amazing. She works with five of her other members. So you'll see that happening all the.
Time, which is amazing. It's like this beautiful organic way of. You don't even have to go in there and shout it from the rooftops if you're. If you're adding value. Value to people.
Exactly.
Okay, so, so tell me about some of the wins that you've seen in the group. Like literally that have come from connecting.
Oh my goodness. So I know there's a million. Oh my gosh. Okay, so one of our members, Carlin, she was featured on Good Morning America through an introduction from the community, which was so incredible to see that happen. And Carlin, she is an amazing business coach. We actually have a second podcast, we have our Entrepreneurista podcast and then we started a podcast just for our members. It's called Startups and Stilettos where we feature members of our community. And Carlin was a founding member of the community. She was showing up in the community. We got to know her really well. So when we were looking for a co host for Startups and Stilettos, she's now the co host of that podcast. So that happened for her. By being in the community. I've made so many intros for members in our community. Just to my network that I have built over the past 10 plus years. I made an intro to a founder that resulted in a million dollar investment in her series A. I made an intro to our member Jill to one of the founders of the laundress when she was first launching her business and she was able to do a brand collaboration with them and like put her business business on the map. And then so many of our members are just collaborating and working together. So one of our members, Jen, she worked with another member and now launched her whole new branding and her website. So these connections are literally happening every single day in the community and it's just so beautiful to see. And you know, building our agency business social fly was there's nothing better than building any type of business. But when you had so social, I was incredible. Right? We're helping all of these brands, their marketing strategies. But when you are building a mission driven business where everything we do every day is helping women founders, like there is nothing, there's nothing better like just getting emails and messages and text messages for our members every day. Like thank you for creating this community because this is literally the best thing in my life. Like I can't get off my computer and I can't stop working because I love it so much. It's just helping everyone.
Oh my God. I love hearing these stories because it should be getting someone excited right now who maybe is not a part of a community. It really is this good. Like it takes a little bit in the beginning to kind of like learn the ropes and even understand how to use it, maybe for people who haven't been in it, but it is so worth it. It's like all of a sudden you're on month two or three and you're like, oh, I get it. I'm like, I know the people. I'm recognizing faces. I've made some friends. You get great opportunities right away. Like it really is the hack to accelerated growth in your business and yourself. Like being able to interact with other high level women is the fastest way to grow yourself into the entrepreneurista who is going to be able to run the business of your dreams. Like there's so many little nuances to being a business owner, founder, CEO that you can only learn by getting to talk to other people. And it will, it'll, it will accelerate your journey. Tell me some of the very vulnerable things that you've experienced actually growing this community. Because I know that there is nothing that holds a mirror up to yourself more than creating communities of women and working really hard to make sure that they are following like kind of the core values that you want to withhold. That's not easy to create that container at first and hold those core values, you know in place. Tell me a little bit about what that was like first. Creating that and trying to really make sure you, you keep those intact.
I will actually say Lori, that that was the easy part because that's amazing. I am just who I am and I genuinely love other people and want to connect and want to help everyone so that those are the type of people that were attracted to join the entrepreneista league. So yeah, there just isn't any type of like cattiness or one upping each other. People like, you know, just doing things aren't nice. It just doesn't exist in our community. We, we've never had any issues. Everyone is genuinely there just to help and support each other or they wouldn't have been attracted to, to join. Entrepreneur stuff. For me, the most challenging part of growing a community has really just been like the business as like the back end of building, building like the physical community and all the technology and email marketing and all of the things that I had actually never done before because growing our marketing agency is a different type of actual business than a community based business. Now everything that Courtney and I had learned growing our agency Business helped us be able to accelerate and build a business a lot faster because we'd already learned so much over the 10 plus plus years. So that's how we were able to do it so quickly was the knowledge that we have from, you know, the past 10 years plus our whole network and resources and you know, that, that helped accelerate it too. But again, I had never built a community based business before. I had built community but not a business around it. So that's been, I would say, the most challenging, you know, learning curve for me.
What does that look like when you are, you know, building that back end? It's kind of like I, I don't know if you found this, but I, of course you have found this. You're building a business where you're, you're constantly me, you know, bringing in different teams and trying out new things and different people for the different back end things, like you need someone else for your website or building out your email flows and you're like, that didn't work very well. They don't understand our voice. Okay, next, like tell me about the challenges that you have bumped up against in the last year even because I want people to hear like, it never ends. It's something that you will continually, if you want to grow, you're always growing and changing your team.
I amount, yeah, it definitely never ends. Although Courtney was just telling me she had coffee the other morning with someone who's grown up. I think she's at a 400 plus person company. And she asked him, she's like, does it ever get easier? And he said, actually it does. We'll have a whole like high level management team that can execute everything without you needing to oversee stuff. He's like, that's when it gets easier because look, it is really challenging right now for me. We're still, you know, know, we're still young entrepreneur is only a few years old. So I am in the weeds on a lot of different things right now. And we have our, you know, three high level leaders in our company, but we're growing out the agencies that we're working with and you know, other team members. And as we're learning, we're changing different models. So like we haven't gotten to the place yet where I can be like, okay, everything's just running on its own. Well, that we will get there. But I am, you know, involved in really absolutely everything right now, which I, I, I love. Is it sustainable? Probably not, but, but right now this is the season of life and the season of business and I know. And Courtney and I are working with coaches right now to help us because we're learning from, you know, what we did really well with Socialblin, what we didn't do well. And we're trying not to repeat mistakes that we made. So we've hired now high level coaches to help us as we're scaling out entrepreneista. And again, like, it's not easy, but having the right people around you makes it. Makes it a lot easier.
Yeah, that is. It's huge. Okay, so tell me about where you want to go with this. Like, you know, for, for people setting different goals. There's actually a lot of people listening, I'm positive, who love the idea of what you have. You know, a lot of the women that I attract all want to build community. What does that look like? Where do you want to go? What's a good place for people? So where do you want to go? But what's a good place for people to start if they think they want to start building a community for themselves?
If you want to build your own community as part of your business, talk to someone who has done it before to learn all of their learning lessons first. Because I was actually saying because I feel like I had these conversations with a lot of our members who want to build communities one on one. And everyone keeps asking me like, for all of my learning lessons from building and I'm like, I probably should do like a mastermind on all of the lessons learned from community building because I have learned more in the past two and a half years, mostly about like all the back end stuff of building community, technology, resources, what everything takes. We made all the mistakes in the beginning, just not, I guess I shouldn't call them mistakes. We just didn't know we hadn't done it before.
Right.
So, like, I love sharing all of our learnings now because I'm like, oh my gosh, if you're going to build a community, like, like use this tool, this platform, don't use this. This will save you a lot of money. This is the go to and I love sharing all that. So talk to me or someone else who's already done it before. You just jump in and do it and build out a whole plan. If you are looking for community, of course, come find me. You could send me a DM on Instagram too. Of course. Join our community. Especially if you're thinking about building a business or you're already building a business. And we will welcome you with open arms too, help you really get on the Right path of what you need.
I am so, like, I'm eating out of your hand. Excited about this community and I'm going to be in it, which is so exciting. I literally can't wait to just check it all out and be a part of everything. So how can we join?
Yes, you can join us by heading over to entrepreneista.com forward/join. And I know, Laura, you'll put. You have a special link. So you can put your special link so we'll know that your awesome listeners came from you. So definitely click on those. Click, click the show notes for your special link entrepreneurs or forward slash join and then you can find me personally, I'm on Instagram. Answer every single dm. It is me. Love connecting with everyone. My Instagram is at Steph Jill Carton. S T E P H J I L L C A R T I N. And you can also follow Entrepreneist on Instagram. We're at that entreprene does with an S at the end on Instagram.
And you guys truly, like, a bunch of my girlfriends are in it and they were talking about it. I was like, wait, what is. What is that? And then a mutual acquaintance that we know introduced us. And I'm like, okay, apparently this is supposed to be in my life because it's in everybody else's. So I'm very excited. I loved this podcast. I know you and I have a couple more podcasts in the future. Yeah, we're gonna maybe do a little. I'm gonna drop a little hint. We're gonna maybe do a little, little series for you so that you can really deep dive into the community aspect if you want to build community as well. And I'm just so grateful that you came on the show. And you guys definitely go follow her. Go click the link in the show notes. And until next time, everyone earn your happy.
Bye. Bye.
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