SDH 251: 3 Foundational Things to Do When Starting Your Business with Lori and Elise Lefcourt

What stage are you on your entrepreneurial journey? Have you taken the leap or are you still in corporate America? Do you have a business partner on a different stage of the journey as you? What are some important practices you can follow to ensure you’re heading your business in the right direction? Today’s guests' combination is a first for the show-- two sisters and business partners on different stages of their entrepreneurial journey. Elise and Lori Lefcourt created Unicreamer, a protein creamer to help busy women control hunger throughout the day as well as serve as an alternative to animal protein. Turn up the volume and listen to how their two unique stories merge into one natural, vegan business. In this episode you will: Hear sacrifices needed for entrepreneurship Uncover three foundational things to do when starting your business Know why you need to network See what they learned about trust during the beginning of their business Understand why working with family can be tricky and the best thing Learn what they wish they could outsource INSIGHTS: “I am one of those people that I was born to be an entrepreneur. I’ve had all these crazy ideas, I think have 50 ideas that go through my brain a day.” Lori “I think one of the hardest things that people go through when starting a business is where do you even start?” Lori “If you feel like you don’t know anything about how to run a business, obviously research is huge and possibly finding a free internship of a company that you can actually work for so you can see the inner workings of how a startup works...if you don’t have the time to go all day and sit behind somebody and watch, I’d say sacrifice that night time instead of watching movies and TV shows do some research and listen to podcast of people who already did it.” Lori “It’s crazy how many people will actually help you when they see that you’re executing and actually doing something.” Lori “When I jumped into this, I jumped in with not a whole lot of savings but with all the knowledge and connections I had with networking to make this a successful business and actually start.” Lori “I think we believe in the product so much that we won’t let ourselves fail at this.” Elise “When we first started it was kind of a mess, you just have to kind of fail forward and be all over the place-- it’s like a beautiful mess I guess and then it kind of all comes together” Lori “Something I think has really worked for us is being authentic and putting out stuff that we actually like and love, especially on social media and Instagram there are so many people these days that are all kind of doing the same exact thing to get these followers, for us it was really about staying true to ourselves and our brand.” Elise “Our original target market was millennials, and it still us, but we’re also learning there is an older crowd of women that are also very interested in our product; that we hadn’t considered before. We will definitely look into tailoring our business to them as well.” Elise “I always practice gratitude, almost every single day whether it’s in my mind or before I go to bed.” Lori “I make sure to make time also for the people that are important in my life, my friends, my family, make sure I give enough time for my dog.” Elise RESOURCES: Unicreamer Website Unicreamer Instagram Unicreamer Facebook “You are a bad ass at Making Money” by Jen Sincero