Build Yourself a Kitchen Cabinet

You’ve got a winning idea. Now you need your personal pit crew to help you nurture it into a real business.

Running a new business idea is usually just that, running. A body in motion tends to stay in motion, so it’s natural to put your head down and follow your business plan methodically. You keep plodding on those monthly goals, weekly tasks and daily to dos. Yup, we are talking to you Type A women with your colorful minute-by-minute planners – a specialty of V’s.

Forging ahead works great, until it doesn’t.

You hit an obstacle that can’t be overcome using the old playbook. Sometimes it’s a market shift, an unexpected business offer or a black hole of insight on your market that you can’t quite figure out how to leverage. As a woman, our first response is to bang our heads against the wall even harder, continuing to follow our current plan into the abyss.

But there’s a better and much less painful way that won’t require migraine meds.

Find a voice (or a few voices) of reason to jolt you into reality and help you look at a problem with a different lens. For us, that was each other and a network of really smart ladies that were our friends and family, past colleagues, and longstanding clients, just to name a few.

Your kitchen cabinet should be a group of unofficial advisors and/or close friends who understand your business goals, give solid advice and aren’t scared to speak truth to power. While there will never be enough Native Bergamot and Sage deodorant in the world to prevent the millions of sweaty armpit moments that give birth to your business idea, surrounding yourself with the right people can and will save you and your idea, probably more than once.

Like every successful entrepreneur before you, you need an informal posse of close confidants and advisors who know things you don’t and are willing to answer your calls or DMs at (almost) any hour of the day or night. And, you need them in place before you actually need them, which is why establishing your network is rule number two on our manifesto. 91% of women who have built a business network say they tap into it more than three times a month!

Many Female Mavericks ask us if their pit crews need to be all female like the famous Ultra Blue Crew who blew the lid off of NASCAR’s crazy misogynistic ways all the way back in 1987. The answer is – it depends. We personally found women more accessible and deeper thinkers on our particular business issues. But, if your industry is male-dominated, or if you are jumping from one that was, you may find a more heavily weighted male network is the one to start with. Start where you are, and just make sure you, you know, START.

Irrespective of gender, these wunderkins will help you find your way through the tough times, or they will link you with colleagues in their network who can. So, let’s start figuring out who they are.

Rule Two: The Female Maverick Must Dos

Step 1: Acknowledge your Achillies heel.

Take an inventory of all the functional areas required to launch and execute your business idea successfully. Think strategy, finance, legal, product development, HR, and any other capability that will be integral to bringing your specific idea to the world. Our Female Mavericks tell us fundraising is always on that list. Build a skills matrix, leaving blanks for any area where you are flying blind.

Step 2: From contacts to connections.

Once you know where you need help, start filling the gaps with the people you know. Look to family and friends. Scour your LinkedIn. (The average entrepreneur has 1300 contacts. The average person has 500 contacts. This means you have potential access to more than 600K contacts to select from!) Recall people you have met at networking events. Connect your contacts with your needs, and you’ve got a first gen networking matrix you can put to work for your business immediately.

Step 3: Narrow the ask.

Find out if your networking matrix is up to the task by taping your arsenal for advice, perspective and the occasional favor – such as an introduction to another person or organization. But make sure you’re asking in the right way to get the response you need.

Step 4: Become your network’s biggest public cheerleader.

Promote the hell out of your BFFs. Smart women, tend to be terrible at taking victory laps. (Many men, ahem….do not seem to have that problem.) Do it for them. And share it across your network so they can expand their own.

What’s Next?

Tempted to put off building your kitchen cabinet until your business idea matures? Don’t. We didn’t. Slavishly making (and keeping) business friends over multiple years – and tapping into them when the need arises – is something we’ve always done and continue to do today to support our third go at a new business. We know from experience we can’t succeed without our peeps. So, let’s do this thing together. Next week, we will build a skill matrix and figure out where exactly, we need a little help from our friends.