فصل 09

9

Taking Care of (Your) Business

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

—Abraham Lincoln I never started a business. I started an eBay store, and ended up with a business. I never would have done it had I known it was going to become this big. I was twenty-two and, like most twenty-two-year-olds, I was looking for a way to pay my rent and buy my Starbucks chai. Had someone shown me the future of where Nasty Gal would be in 2014, I would have gasped in revulsion, thinking, Oh, hell no, that is way too much work. The name of the company alone should clue you in to this fact—who would have thought that a company called Nasty Gal could be so successful? I sure as shit never intended to be saying those two words all day, every day, seven years later.

There are different kinds of entrepreneurs. There are the ones who start a business because they’re educated and choose to, and the ones who do it because it is really the only option. I definitely fall into the latter category. I considered myself completely unemployable, and wanted to give one last shot at my ideal of being “jobless.” And boy, did being jobless work for me.

Nasty Gal would have surely failed had it been my goal to grow a business to the size that I have today. When you begin with the finish line in mind, you miss all the fun stuff along the way. The better approach is to tweak and grow, tweak and grow. I call it the incremental potential. In e-commerce, you have to get everything right—from the marketing to the product descriptions to the checkout process. Because I started small, I think I inherently did that from the beginning. Customer service was my number one priority. A lot of people run their businesses like their customers are dummies. This is a mistake. If you’re just out to take their money, they know it. But if you genuinely care about what you’re doing, they will respond. I knew my customers and knew what they liked, because I was my customer. And rather than dictating what I thought my customers should buy and wear, I listened instead. If I bought something and they hated it, I moved on. Rather than force my idea of what Nasty Gal should be on my customers, I let them tell me along the way.

Nasty Gal felt like the best-dressed girl’s best-kept secret—except that it was a secret she really wanted to share. As I mentioned earlier, one key to running a successful business is to know how to get free marketing. Rule number one? That’s simple. Just do a good job. Through the styling, photography, and voice of the brand, Nasty Gal was an exciting place to shop, but if our customers weren’t equally as stoked when they were holding one of our products in their hands, then that excitement lived and died on the Internet. I don’t take it lightly when someone buys something from me. I know there are a million places where people can buy a dress, a crop top, or a pair of shoes, so I want to make sure that if someone is buying it from Nasty Gal, she feels like it’s worth it. We’re dressing girls for the best years of their lives, so whether you drop $300 or shop the sale section, I want you to look and feel like a million bucks.

Rule number two: Keep your promises. When girls bought something from Nasty Gal, what they got in the mail was just as amazing as what they’d seen online. Customers became not only loyal, but also evangelical. They came back again and again, and shared their excitement with their friends—frequently on the Internet. It was the kind of natural word of mouth that can’t be bought.

Rule number three: Give your customers something to share. Social media is built on sharing, and Nasty Gal was giving girls something amazing to share each and every day. Whether it was a crazy vintage piece, a quote, or a behind-the-scenes photo, we have always worked hard to create the best and most compelling images, words, and content for our customers.

At most companies the person manning the Twitter and Facebook accounts is far from the top of the food chain. But at Nasty Gal, even though I’m not always composing every tweet, I still read every comment. If our customers are unhappy about something, I hear it first. At other businesses, it might take months for customer feedback to filter up to the CEO, if at all. Social media allows me to have my ear to the ground even when I’m out pounding the pavement. When Nasty Gal joined Snapchat, it meant that I joined Snapchat. I sent out a few Snaps, and our customers responded in force. There’s nothing more thrilling than sending private texts directly to a customer and seeing what she has to say in response.

Call me crazy, but I truly believe that Nasty Gal is a feeling. And though our community lives in many different places, it’s that feeling that unifies our customers and makes us about much more than selling clothes.

The Incremental Potential

Author Malcolm Gladwell believes that one can be an expert at something after putting in ten thousand hours of practice. Needless to say, my ten thousand hours are far behind me. Had I waited to finish a business plan, or waited for investors to validate my idea, my ten-thousand-hour clock might never have begun. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not knocking business plans. What I intend to illustrate is that just going for it can be much more rewarding. Business plans are just a starting point—the best entrepreneurs know to listen along the way and adjust things, including their business plan. This advice applies to life as well, dear #GIRLBOSS. Turn on the jets and ready, set, . . . listen.

Starting a business is risky no matter which way you look at it, but it’s much riskier when you have a ton of overhead and money guys anxiously waiting to earn a return on their investment. Starting a business also takes a lot of personal sacrifice. If you start a business, expect that you’re probably going to be broke for a long time. If you’re not broke, consider yourself broke, because as we discussed earlier, it is shortsighted to pay yourself a big salary too early. Dream big all you want—that’s what this entire book is about!—but know that the first step toward those dreams is probably going to be a small one.

Many people mistake the glamour of business for business. One of my pet peeves includes entrepreneurs who issue press releases about their new venture before making their first dollar. I waited until I knew for sure that I had something to say before talking to the press—about anything—which took about five years. While media coverage can boost sales and garner attention from the business community, tooting your own horn too early can put you under the spotlight when you’re still figuring out the basics of running your business. I’ve seen many a start-up disappear after making a big splash in the press. Though I’m rarely surprised, it feels good to be the fabled turtle in this scenario rather than the hare.

I didn’t know anybody to turn to for business advice, and because of this, people ask me all the time how I figured it out. Well, I figured it out by doing what I think is one of the best strategies for learning anything anywhere: I Googled it. There is a whole wide world of free education out there for anyone who wishes to take advantage of it. Granted, a book might cost you $13, but that’s pennies compared with college tuition. When I needed to know what kinds of shelving to buy for the warehouse, I Google Image–searched “warehouse shelving” and spent an afternoon looking at pictures of shelves until I figured out which ones would be best for our needs.

I turned to YouTube to watch experts speak at conferences I wouldn’t have been invited to even if I had been able to afford to attend. I learned a ton about how to structure Nasty Gal by looking at similar businesses to see who they had hired and were hiring. I then viewed those people’s profiles on LinkedIn to see what type of experience it takes to do that job successfully. And while I took it all with a grain of salt, it got me far.

Nasty Gal is now big enough for me to be able to hire people who are experts in their respective fields. But don’t be fooled: I’m still calling the shots. I hate it when I’m in a meeting with one of our top officers and someone addresses her the entire time, assuming that the “adult” in the room must be the one making the decisions. Don’t you dare think that my shredded T-shirt makes me a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I, like every #GIRLBOSS, am a wolf in wolf’s clothing.

Entrepreneurialism Is an Eighteen-Letter Word

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.

—Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn

I think everyone should tap into their entrepreneurial spirit. However, I don’t think everyone should be an entrepreneur. Harvard Business School professor Howard Stevenson famously defined “entrepreneurship” as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” I give a “hell yes” to that definition—you should take that spirit with you to whatever job you’re doing or whatever project you’re undertaking.

When I was twenty-two, the thought of rising up within an organization was completely incomprehensible. To me, office jobs were like school, where the best way to get along was to show up on time, not ask questions, follow all the rules, and not make a fuss. Again, not my jam. However, that accepted paradigm is changing, and faster than ever. As Seth Godin points out in his book Linchpin, our society’s existing ideas of education and employment are held over from a time when most jobs were in factories. People were trained to do exactly what they were told, and only what they were told, in order to keep things running smoothly. Following the rules without question was precisely what got someone promoted. Thankfully, though, this is changing, and in Linchpin, Godin elaborates that “it’s becoming clear that people who reject the worst of the current system are actually more likely to succeed.” If you need proof of that, well, hi. Here I am.

What I’m getting at here is that you can be entrepreneurial without being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial people are passionate about what they do, comfortable with taking risks, and quick at moving on from failures. These are all things I look for in the people I hire. I want problem solvers who take nothing at face value. I want people who fight for their ideas, even fight with me. I want people who are comfortable with disagreement. And I need people who sometimes, after all of that, hear the word “no” and get right back up to work even harder. There are a lot of companies changing the way they do things right now. It’s a pretty exciting time to be in business, but only if you’re surrounded by exciting people.

The Nasty Gal Philosophy

Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliver good service from unhappy employees.

—Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO and author of Delivering Happiness

At Nasty Gal, we have something we like to call “Our Philosophy.” It’s a set of directives that align us to stay focused on what really matters. We designed them really nice and pretty, and have them posted up around our offices as a little daily reminder of why we’re all here. Even if you never land that coveted buying job in our headquarters, these ideas can be applied to any career path you choose:

Nasty Gal Obsessed: We keep the customer at the center of everything we do. Without customers, we have nothing.

Own It: Take the ball and run with it. We make smart decisions, put the business first, and do more with less.

People Are Important: Reach out, make friends, build trust.

No Assholes: We leave our egos at the door. We are respectful, collaborative, curious, and open-minded.

Learn On: What we’re building has never been built before—the future is ours to write. We get excited about growth, take intelligent risks, and learn from our mistakes.

Have Fun and Keep It Weird.

On Investors

When I lived in San Francisco, my friends and I existed far outside the tech scene that made our rents so expensive. Broke as a joke, drinking Amstel Light and disco dancing in dive bars, we couldn’t have been further removed. VC might as well have stood for Velveeta cheese, for all I knew. I just wondered who all of these people were, walking around in their hoodies with their white earbuds. Little did I know they were the reason some of my favorite burrito joints had become extinct.

When the time came for me to grow familiar with the concept of investors, it was still pretty intimidating. My first meeting with venture capitalists was scary: for one, I had never been in a boardroom. And it didn’t take me long to realize we were speaking completely different languages. I felt like a little kid who had no place at the table. For about a year after that, whenever anyone reached out about investing in Nasty Gal, I just didn’t respond.

Then I had to fire a really senior executive. And though it had no linear relationship to taking investment, it was a pretty gnarly experience that drove home the fact that if I was going to be a CEO (which I already was) and run a really big, fast-growing company (which I already was), I was going to have to do some stuff I didn’t like. I grew some balls and finally decided to answer some of those calls. I headed up to Silicon Valley to meet with investors.

In San Francisco I picked up my friend Diego, a fellow entrepreneur and one of the smartest people I know. He’d already been through the process of raising venture capital, so we powwowed in the car as I picked his brain. It was my crash course and I needed it: I was in and out of six meetings that day, all with different firms.

This time around I knew that I had nothing to lose: Nasty Gal was kicking ass, profitable, and had money in the bank. Either way, we were going to be fine. While most entrepreneurs meet investors with a presentation on what they plan to do with their business, I, being my PowerPoint–challenged self, arrived empty-handed. It turned out that Nasty Gal’s strongest selling point wasn’t what we were going to do, but what we’d already done.

“We’re going to do one hundred million dollars this year.”

“No, I’ve never borrowed a dime.”

“No, I didn’t go to college.”

“No, I don’t have previous experience running a business.”

I got pretty accustomed to saying all of those things, and as I knocked down meeting after meeting, something pretty shocking dawned on me: Holy shit, these people are impressed.

Sand Hill Road is the legendary venture capital hub in Menlo Park between Stanford University and Silicon Valley. The people who sit in those offices operate in a very different paradigm than I do, spending their days talking business models and IPOs in a way that I never will. It was strangely encouraging for me to come out of nowhere with instant respect from people I felt were an entirely different species. Some of them wanted to be friends and others tried to appeal to my edgy side (and FYI, “edgy” ranks right up there with “twerk,” “yummy,” and “ridonkulous” on my list of least favorite words). One investor left me a strange late-night voice mail and then apologized for it on the phone the next day. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I was all messed up on Percocet and Jack Daniels.” I’d be freaked out if a friend said something like that, so needless to say, I did not go with that firm.

It seemed most of the venture capitalists I met with had recently and unanimously “discovered” that women liked to buy things online. They were super-stoked on the idea of a female-run business that sold things to women. I happened to check a lot of the boxes that they were excited about at the time, but they had no idea why Nasty Gal was special. It was obvious to me that their ideas weren’t their own. One person asked to call my former COO, Frank, to talk about the business. I said sure, and gave him Frank’s number. I later found out that he asked if I had a “spending problem.” When I heard this, I thought to myself, Dude: I built a multimillion-dollar business out of $50 and no debt—does it look like I have a spending problem?

The only person I liked was Danny Rimer. Danny’s company, Index Ventures, was based in Europe and had just opened their U.S. office far from Silicon Valley, in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, where the start-ups were. Danny had also already been investing in great fashion companies since before the other guys knew what fashion was—like ASOS and Net-a-Porter—so I knew that he was interested in Nasty Gal because he truly got us, not because we were the hot ticket. Danny had a brand—and I get brands. Index has chosen to surround itself with the best entrepreneurs and the best companies. I realized that, just as all department stores are not created equal, all investors are not created equal. Danny was my flagship Barneys.

After our first meeting, Danny called me and said, “You have a community. I get it.” And I knew it was a match made in heaven. He also seemed to inherently understand the challenges we were facing. At this point in time, we still didn’t have a head of finance, so we couldn’t answer half of the questions other firms were asking us. Danny recognized this. He didn’t ask us to go through due diligence (a term for digging through the company’s receipts and financials). Realizing that I’d never used PowerPoint, Danny also had an associate from his team put together an investment deck for me to present to the partnership. When it came time to negotiate, it was like haggling at the flea market. He said, “I would like to buy X percentage of the company for X amount of dollars,” and I said, “No, X percentage for Y dollars.” And then we were done. It was a small investment—$9 million is not a small sum, I know—but it is atypical for a company of Nasty Gal’s size. Yet I was new at this and Danny knew it. Instead, he leaned in and suggested we shake hands on doing something small now with the goal of doing another, bigger investment if we both still liked each other in six months.

Had I not found Danny, I probably wouldn’t have taken investment. But his contrarian way of thinking, as well as his instant understanding of what I was building, made me love him. Index passes on investments that a lot of these guys drool over. I liked that. For Index, investing in a business is not just a mercenary transaction. Index wants to be involved and they want you to be exciting. They’ve passed on good financial investments because they simply didn’t like the entrepreneur. And I respect them for that.

What I really learned from this entire experience is that people want to invest in businesses that don’t need money, and that your ability to execute has to be just as strong if not stronger, than your idea. And, just like how I want to buy that item behind the counter at the vintage store that isn’t for sale, venture capitalists want to invest in businesses that also “aren’t for sale.” Human nature tells us to want what we can’t have. A desperate business is not a good look, and most investors won’t touch that with a ten-foot pole.

Even if you have no plans to ever find yourself sitting across from a venture capitalist with a pitch in your hand, getting this far in #GIRLBOSS training should have taught you to rule nothing out. Perhaps someday you will have a business that’s the next big thing (I hope you do!), so it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. Here are a few tips for sparring with investors that you can also apply to other areas of your life.

Turn-ons:

Good people: This is the number one thing that distinguishes one start-up from another. Investors, like employers, look for people who are excited about what they’re doing and have the integrity to keep their promises. They also want to see that you have a smart, creative team with diverse experience. The concept of “good people” should apply to every part of life. Surround yourself with people who are engaged, honest, and confident enough on their own quest to support you on yours. There is no time for losers.

Scalability: Ultimately, the market, technology, fashion—whatever it is that is at the core of your business—is going to change, so investors as well as employers need to know you’ll be able to change with it. Or even better: Stay ahead of it. Most investors are looking to make a return of at least five to ten times what they invest, so you have to demonstrate that your company can achieve that growth.

Evidence of demand: Have something that a lot of people are going to want. By the time I was talking to Index, we already had hundreds of thousands of rowdy Nasty Gals the world over, so it was very easy for us to prove that there was a more than viable market for our brand. When you’re applying for jobs, it’s best to be employed while doing it. You want the world to know that you’re not lollygagging between gigs, but instead have a lot of choices in front of you and are actively charting your own path.

Outside validation: You can sell yourself all day long, but sometimes it’s more effective when other people sell you (aka your references). An investor is much more likely to be interested in your pitch if he or she has already heard about you because people are excited about what you’re doing. Great references (or a glowing introduction) never hurt.

Uniqueness: This is where it comes down to your idea and how good it is. Taking someone else’s idea and adapting it for a different demographic isn’t really an idea, so good luck finding someone to invest in NastyGuy.com, your idea for a site that sells badass clothing to dudes. In whatever you do, you’re not going to stand out unless you think big and have ideas that are truly original. That comes from tapping into your own creativity, not obsessing over what everyone else is doing.

Turnoffs:

Overconfidence: You need to be passionate and excited about what you’re doing, but don’t be so blinded by it that you’re unrealistic. If you’re saying things like “No one has ever done this before,” it usually just comes across as cocky or, worse, uninformed. As a #GIRLBOSS you should always be confident—and absolutely sure—about what you know, but humble about what you don’t.

Talking about how soon you plan to exit: This might work for some people, but most investors are in it for the long haul. It’s for the same reasons that I don’t like it when I ask people where they want to be in two years and they answer that they want to own their own fashion business. People like to see evidence of commitment.

Typos and general unpreparedness: Yeah, this is just basically a turnoff for anyone, everywhere. PORTRAIT OF A #GIRLBOSS:

Jenné Lombardo, Founder of the Terminal Presents; theterminalpresents.com (@JenneLombardo)

I get my hustle on every day. For me it’s family first, paper second. Growing up, I always wanted to have my own office—I thought that epitomized success. I also always wanted something that was mine. Something that was tangible, which I could look at and say, with pride, “I did this.”

When I was growing up my family lost a lot of our money and I was forced to go get it on my own. My work ethic is partly fear-driven—I never want to be without financial stability again. Also, I want to be on Fortune’s “40 Under 40” list. (I’m too old to make Forbes’s “30 Under 30”!) I feel like I take risks every day, and the biggest risk I take is on life. Without risk there is no reward and no change. How boring would this world be if there weren’t people out there like Rosa Parks, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs? There are two types of people out there—those who do and those who don’t. If you are a risk taker, you have to feel comfortable in knowing you could fail. You have to have enough confidence and conviction to go full force even if things don’t work out. For us risk takers it’s an occupational hazard. If we fail, we get right up and try again. Just doing is reward enough.

I am creative in almost every aspect of my life, particularly when it comes to solving problems. Whether we chose to believe this or not, there is a solution to everything. It’s all a matter of perspective and how willing we are to be flexible when it comes to our point of view. I don’t see things the way a trained eye would. In fact I question everything—how can I make this better, how could we be operating at maximum efficiency? It’s a blessing and a curse. Challenging convention and not accepting the norm is a world I have come to live in. I read everything and I ask a lot of questions. You won’t get anywhere just talking about yourself. Listen. It’s one of the greatest gifts you could give to yourself.

I’m constantly inspired by everyone I work with and the tribes we assemble. I am inspired by youth culture. I love knowing everything—what they are wearing, what they are listening to, what apps they are using. Kids are the future. If I wanna stick with the future, I gotta stay close to the game.

My advice to #GIRLBOSSes is: Create your own job. Become the master of what you do. Fully immerse yourself in your culture. Be humble: You are never above having to pack boxes. Never forget where you came from. And always be polite. Good old-fashioned manners can get you very far.