Starting a business is difficult, with many small businesses failing within the first few years.
Morgan DeBaun, CEO of Blavity Inc., joins Wealth to discuss her journey of building a $40 million business from the ground up, sharing her secrets to thriving through failure, delegating, leveraging her passion, and building a strong team.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Wealth here.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20% of all small businesses fail in the first year. Nearly half fail in their first five years, and 65% fail in their first 10 years. So clearly, it is not easy to start a small business. It's also not easy to keep one going in the long term. My next guest has beaten the odds, starting a business in 2014 that now has revenue of more than $40 million a year. Here with Morgan DeBaun, CEO of Blavity. It's a media and technology company with content tailored to black millennials. And by the way, she's also launching her debut book, "Rewrite Your Rules," that's out today. Morgan, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
So, first, I want to dive into your career and how you achieve that staying power for your business, right? You left Silicon Valley nearly a decade ago to launch Blavity. Launching a business, obviously, isn't always an easy thing. And, as we've talked about, keeping it going is not always an easy thing. So what lessons did you learn? What would you advise people who are looking to embark on this path?
You know, entrepreneurship is really hard. You saw those stats. They're rough out here. One of the first things that I did that was really helpful was having really good advisors. Most people get mentors. Mentors are people who are with you through the ups and the downs, but an advisor is someone who really has the skills to actually get you to the next level. A lot of people just spend too much time with people who are emotionally vested in them, but don't actually have the skill set to give them the tactical advice that they need to get to the next level.
Interesting. And that, you know, staying power can be helpful, too, if that person is sticking with you. So some of the lessons that you talk about here, leveraging your passion, embracing failure, building a solid team, and becoming a master delegator. I want to linger on failure for a moment because, you know, I know that this is really embraced by successful entrepreneurs, is not being afraid to make mistakes and fail, right? So how does that play out in the business, like how do you get over that fear of failing and sort of allow yourself to do it?
Yeah. Part of rewriting your rules is actually failing quickly. So it's not that you don't fail at all, but the most successful people fail at a really quick pace. They take the learnings, the information, all the data that they've collected through that process, and then they just iterate slightly to get to the next level. And I think that a lot of us, we were conditioned growing up to say like, "I've got to get the A, I've got to get the A." And so we're so focused on perfection when in reality, we need to be focused on actually getting the information that we need to say, "Am I validating this idea in the marketplace? Do my customers like this? Are they sharing it? Do I have that word of mouth?" That's what's going to help you grow and scale much faster.
What about leveraging your passion? What does that mean when it comes to starting a business?
So starting a business is so hard. There's going to be years where you don't make any money, you might have years where you have almost no take-home pay. So you have to be intrinsically motivated. So you have to make sure that the person that you're solving a problem for is someone that you feel like a lot of joy and passion for because at the end of the day, business is going to go up and down. But what's always going to be true is that you're solving a problem for a customer.
