Today marks a significant milestone for us – it's our 100th episode! In this episode, we're taking a moment to reflect on the incredible journey we've had, diving into the diverse and inspiring stories of founders and entrepreneurs from all walks of life. Over the years, we've had the privilege of interviewing nearly 2,000 founders, each sharing their unique experiences and the words that define their entrepreneurial journey. From "serendipitous" to "accidental," "intentional," "purposeful," and "risk," these words encapsulate the essence of what it means to embark on the founder's path. In today's episode, I shared my own journey of starting Bright Marketing and how the word "serendipitous" resonates with my experience. We also revisited some memorable stories from our past guests, like Judy, the mannequin reseller, who described her journey as "accidental," and Laura Bakerstaff, whose journey was driven by "survival." We also discussed the common goals and aspirations of founders, highlighting the recurring theme of seeking "freedom" – whether it's the freedom to make choices, expand operations, or simply take a well-deserved vacation. Additionally, I took a moment to clarify some common confusions among entrepreneurs regarding branding, marketing, and advertising, emphasizing the importance of understanding these concepts to effectively scale and grow a business. As we celebrate this 100th episode, I encourage all our listeners, especially founders and entrepreneurs, to reflect on their journeys and consider what word best defines their own experiences. Your stories inspire us, and we look forward to bringing you more insightful and engaging content. Thank you for being a part of our community, and here's to many more episodes of Hello Chaos, where "aha meets oh shit." Don't forget to check out our digital magazines in Greenville, Charleston, and Columbia, and share your thoughts and stories with us. Let's continue to build a connected and supportive entrepreneurial ecosystem together!
Jennifer Sutton: All right, welcome to Hello Chaos, a weekly podcast exploring the messy and chaotic lives and minds of founders, entrepreneurs and innovators. Every week we talk to entrepreneurs from different industries, different company stages, all shapes and sizes. We like to hear the real, the raw, the unbiased founder stories, what it's like to be an entrepreneur. And it's why our mantra is where aha meets oh shit. We drop new episodes every Sunday. Founders listen to us on a Sunday afternoon while they prep for the week ahead, or actually a lot of them listen to us on their drive into work on Monday morning. And HelloCast is brought to us by the many resources by OrangeWIP. That is OrangeWIP, W-I-P for work in progress. OrangeWIP is a multimedia company dedicated to serving founders and entrepreneurs in affiliate cities through hyper-local media platforms that have been designed to inform, inspire, and create connections to help founders succeed. OrangeWIP is an all-in-one content hub for founders with fresh and engaging stories curated calendars, and local dynamic roadmaps to help the founders navigate their local entrepreneurial ecosystem. Woo, that's a big word. Big phrase, entrepreneurial ecosystems. We've done the hard work for founders so they only need to go to one trusted source in their local market to find all the information they need in one place. My name is Jennifer Sutton. My friends and family call me JJ. I am the founder of OrangeWIP, and I'm the host today and actually this is a fun episode because it is Hello Chaos's 100th episode. Shout out if we had some sound effects we would do the clap, the applause, all the celebration. And really, it's just don't have a guest today because we really wanted to just mark the fact that we've done 100 interviews, 100 conversations with founders and entrepreneurs on Hello Chaos. But OrangeWIP, OrangeWIP, we've talked to close to 2,000 founders from all over the country, again, shapes and sizes. And one of the interview questions that as we talk in our conversations is, you know, founders talk about their founder journey, they talk about their challenges, those aha moments that might have turned in, you know, or the oh shit moments that might have turned into the aha moments, or sometimes those are very different. and we work through how did you overcome those challenges, what were those barriers, but we ask what's one word, what's the one word that would define your journey as an entrepreneur, as a founder, And it's interesting, after the 2,000 interviews and the 100 episodes we've done on Hello Chaos, not the same word is used. We get different words from every founder. I say that my journey is defined as serendipitous. When I started Bright Marketing 10 years ago, I fell into it, never thought I would start and be an entrepreneur or start be a business owner. It wasn't a dream. It just opportunity presented itself. And it was, whoa, this is this is pretty exciting. I can make a go at it. And and we we've been around for 10 years and still growing and scaling. But we've had words such as we've had accidental entrepreneur from Judy. We've had, who was a mannequin reseller of used mannequins out of Oakland, but she's a global reseller of mannequins and mannequin parts. Heads, hands, feet, legs. She's so funny. She's like, accidental, you know, and she started her company when she was 50. I started my company when I was 40, so I think breaking the norms of what it means to be a founder and entrepreneur, it's not that 25-year-old or that 28-year-old. We're all ages, all shapes, all sizes. out there. Other words have been like, we've had intentional. We've had words like, you know, intentional or purposeful. We've had words, journeys that people said, oh, you know, legacy. You know, this was the, if they had to sum up theirs, their journey, it was all about building a legacy, something to hand down to the next generations and their family. some other fantastic words that we've had to explain somebody's journey or to define a journey. Risk was, you know, taking the risk, having confidence to take the risk. So those have been interesting conversations. When a founder goes, that defines their word, is being able to take the risk. Other words that we've had, it's been, you know, somebody was like, it's been fun, just, or exhilarating, has been another word, and words used to define the journey. Others have been, you know, like I said, we've had all sorts of words that people have used. You know, like I said, intentional, purposeful, accidental. I'm serendipitous. Another founder we talked to, her word was survival. She literally came in to the founder space to start her company. all because of she had to survive. She, you know, Laura Bakerstaff, which was just a few episodes ago, and her story is amazing. But again, her work was survival. And Yeah, it's just been amazing to, to, to think through, uh, uh, you know, we had one Will Stewart with, uh, nine, eight central and Pronk. Um, he's been on the journey about as long as I have, you know, 10 plus years and, and his was love of, he defined like everything. The ethos of his company has all been love for video, love for storytelling. Love for the clients that he works with and his team and what they do. Love, you know, that was his defining word of his journey. Skip Wilson was all on, you know, radical empathy. It's something that he learned as he came to be a founder, working in the corporate space for 30 years. and then journeying out on his own. He never really realized how much being an empathizer to team and staff and clients and really walking in other people's shoes in order to develop the products and the services that he had. So, you know, the radical empathy. And he also kind of tagged that with having discipline. And you really, you have to be so disciplined as a founder. As an entrepreneur, scaling your business, it takes a lot of discipline. Discipline thinking, discipline methods, and just amazing stories. Jeff Carver with with Robojuice, you know, he talks about his journey being blessed. You know, if he had to define his word, it was being blessed. And, you know, again, a lot of like mind serendipitous, you know, his was when a door opens, you got to walk through it. And he's been blessed with every, you know, lesson that he's learned. He's thought of it as a gift. or it's been a lesson to overcome, but it's all, he looks at it as, and viewed his entire journey as a blessing. Amy Tucker with Salty Britches, fantastic entrepreneur and developer of skincare products, chemist, you know, background, you know, her word was faith, of have faith in yourself, have faith in your values. which is, you know, great lessons for founders as they, you know, when they start building the business, having that discipline of thought of who you are as a company, what brand you're developing. And Amy talks a lot around, you know, they really define what their values were, what the morals and the culture of the company they were creating. and really doubling down on having faith in yourself, but having faith in those values and staying true to them. And she acknowledges and recognizes that because of those disciplines, It has allowed her to get into spaces she never thought she could, scale the business as quickly as she could, all around being faithful to her values. And so yeah, we've had these wonderful, wonderful explorations of these words. I'm curious if anybody, you know, listens to this episode, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear what, if you're a founder, an entrepreneur, what would your word be that defines your journey? You know, is it different? As we found, there are hundreds of words that we've heard from people. And when we've also asked, you know, the difference of what are the goals? Like, what do you want to overcome? It's different than the words that define their journey. When we said, you know, what do you want to have happen? What's the outcome that you're looking for as, you know, being a founder? A lot of the research that we showed, it was, you know, of course, people want to make money. Of course, they want to grow a business. But what we kept hearing resonating over and over and over again was the word freedom of, man, I want to grow the business to a point where I have the freedom to hire the team that I want to hire. or I need to get this funding or I need to get gain this capital so that I can advertise and expand my business or expand my operation, manufacturing, supply chain development, whatever it is. But it's that the freedom of that choice, or some have it very, you know, personal. um freedom of I want to get to a point in my business so I can have the freedom to take that vacation that I've not been able to take for five years because you've been working 80, 90, 100 hours the last two or three years really trying to grind in the business um and that's we kept hearing over and over again of the outcome of why do I want to be or why do I want to scale or what is my projection? What do I want to see happen in six months or a year or two years from now? And we just kept hearing the word freedom. I want freedom. I want those sales. I want to be able to do these things. I want to have the freedom of choices, the freedom to make decisions, but very different in terms of what defines their journey. The words that defines these individual journeys of being a founder has been, those reflections have been amazing conversations within our podcast. So take a listen to some of these episodes, hear these journeys because they are very unique. A lot of the challenges that we face are sometimes, you know, the similarities of those barriers or questions founders have. We see that, you know, we've heard a lot of similarities in those questions, but the journeys have been unique in how they've overcome or how they've embraced their journey and found and really found that they loved the journey. So those words like empathy, discipline, love, blessed, faith, serendipitous, accidental, intentional, purposeful, risk, those are just the ones at the top of my head. But again, 100 episodes to listen to. And just to take like a little small little break of, you know, one thing that we do work with a lot of these founders and entrepreneurs, one of the biggest questions, you know, as ones, a lot of the ones are like, how do they scale? How do they grow? The question a lot of them have is they don't understand the difference between branding, marketing, and advertising. And we've done some solo podcasts on some of those messages. Take a listen to those, especially like what is branding, what is marketing, what is advertising. But to remind our listeners, and especially our founders and our entrepreneurs that are listening, Branding is what you want to say, what is the message, what's the structure of your business, but as it reflects from the consumer's perspective, but what is the message that's really going to connect with your audience. The marketing is how it's going to be conveyed. So branding is what, marketing is how, how is it going to be conveyed to your internal people. How is it going to get conveyed in your, if you have a bricks and mortar, how is it going to be conveyed in your, in your physical space? If you're an online, you know, retailer and e-commerce, how is it going to be conveyed on your website? How is it going to be conveyed in social? How does it get conveyed in, you know, an ad campaign? And then, Media planning or advertising is where, where is that message going to go? Is it going to, you know, where is it going to be seen? And is it in social? Are you paying for it? Is it going to be found in search? So wherever that's the media planning is the is the where it's how Or where are you going to be seen, heard, found, discovered? It's the where. And what's that media mix that's going to resonate and connect and drive those sales? So branding is the what. Marketing is the how, and media planning and advertising is the where. Where is it going to be displayed? Where does it show up? And we help our, you know, Hello Chaos is an orange whip. It's really a media company that is dedicated to serving founders and entrepreneurs. How do we scale? But our sister company, the studio, the content creator is Bright, Bright Marketing. And that's been around for 10 years. And we help companies of all shapes and sizes. We fuel client growth. We outwork, outsmart, outperform. a lot of other agencies because we understand the fundamental frameworks between branding, marketing and media and help clients navigate and build those structures, build those messaging, build those ecosystems in order to generate their own sales, get to their goals, have that freedom, freedom of choice. That's what we do. So thank you for tuning into this One wonderful incredible 100th episode of Hello Chaos. It is where aha meets oh shit. Thank you for tuning in and I wanted also to plug our digital magazines that are in our three affiliate markets. which is Greenville, Charleston, Columbia. Today, we love to expand to other markets. We feel like every city, every market, every entrepreneurial ecosystem needs an orange whip or a connective tissue within that community. to support the entrepreneurs, to support the founders, to navigate their local ecosystem, what resources are available to them, where do they seek funding, who do they need to go talk to, kind of help you prep a little bit of why you need to go talk to some of these organizations, what's their purpose. We kind of, we help disseminate and bring clarity to a lot of those resources that are available to the entrepreneurs in each market. But Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston today, hopefully 30 markets over the next five years is where we'd like to expand. But check out this month's edition. It's solely, we're celebrating the 100th episode. of Hello Chaos, where we go into the deep dives of the stories of some of the words and some of the journeys of the interviews that we've had. So give you a little bit richer, deeper connection with the founders there. So go check that out. That is orangewhip.com. Find a city, go look at that digital magazine and check it out. And obviously share and like our content. We love to build a more connected entrepreneurial community. That's what it's all about. So thanks for tuning in. Find us at any podcast, your favorite podcast platform. We're there. Hello Chaos Podcast. And we'll see you again next week.