1. Unleashing the Power of Women Entrepreneurs: The Figure Eight Podcast
EPISODE 1
Ever wondered how a simple idea scribbled on a napkin can evolve into an eight-figure empire?
In this introductory episode of the Figure Eight podcast, host Julie Ellis will take you through the incredible journey of Mabel's Labels and moving beyond it.
From a light-bulb moment to the nail-biting experience of scaling up for major retail to the emotional journey of selling and stepping into an advisory role for other entrepreneurs, you’ll discover the reality of switching gears and the insights gained from both sides of the business fence.
Catch the Conversation
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Julie Ellis (00:00:04) - Welcome to Figure Eight, where we feature inspiring stories of women entrepreneurs who have grown their businesses to seven and eight figures revenue. If you're in the mix of growing a bigger business, these stories are for you. Join us as we explore where the tough spots are, how to overcome them, and how to prepare yourself for the next portion of the climb. I'm your host, Julie Ellis. I'm an author, entrepreneur, and a growth in leadership coach who co-founded, grew, and exited an eight figure business. This led me to exploring why some women achieve great things, and that led to my book, Big Gorgeous Goals. Let's explore the systems, processes and people that help us grow our businesses to new heights. If you're interested in growing your business, this podcast will help. Now let's get going. Hello and welcome to the Figure eight podcast. I'm your host, Julie Ellis, and I'm an entrepreneur, author, coach to entrepreneurs as well as a keynote speaker. And this podcast is really about highlighting the women entrepreneurs that I've met along the way who are growing great, seven and eight figure revenue businesses.
Julie Ellis (00:01:34) - So we're going to be in conversation with a lot of really interesting women who have businesses that range from just over $1 million up to more than $10 million in revenue every year. And I'm really interested in learning from them what that journey is like and what's been wonderful about it, what's been difficult about it, how they've navigated the crazy climb that's involved in growing a business and where they're at today, and where they see themselves going in the next months, years, as long as they continue to own the business. Some of the women are still digging in and looking to grow. Some of them are looking at other ways of growing, like having multiple smaller businesses. Some of them have now exited and all of their stories are so interesting, and I'm always surprised at what the commonalities are of our experiences, as well as what all the differences are. So let me tell you a little bit about myself. I have a university degree in dance, and while I was at University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, I met and became friends with some women who would prove to be very pivotal in my life.
Julie Ellis (00:03:07) - I left Waterloo and entered a management training program with one of Canada's major banks. That was a result of the part time job I had working as a bank teller when I was in university, and I eventually worked my way up at the bank to being a licensed financial planner. So I took a lot of courses and passed a lot of tests. And I had a great book of clients, um, that I really, really enjoyed doing full range financial planning for, as well as managing a book of investments and or credit that they had, you know, as part of their portfolio. But something was a little bit missing for me, and I think that it was around, you know, I wanted to climb the ladder, but I had two small children. And, you know, the idea of taking a commuter train from my small city in the west end of Toronto into the big city every day and not being available when the inevitable calls came from the daycare or the school that, you know, there was a sick child and somebody needed a pick up and all of those things.
Julie Ellis (00:04:15) - And so flash back to those friends from university. They were now all related to me through marriage. And we started talking about the idea of making a business out of name labels for kids. And so we knew that. We were sending our kids to daycare, and the daycare was asking us to label everything. And when we asked how. They said with a masking tape, with masking tape and a sharpie, and we didn't think it was the prettiest way to do it. We also quickly realized that it wasn't that durable. And so an idea was born, and we entered into a phase of doing a lot of research and testing. That took us about a year, and we finally launched our business, Mabel's Labels, in March of 2003. We made our first sets of labels after, you know, sending a letter out to not all of our friends because we couldn't afford to send it to everyone. But most of our friends and some of them had kindly placed orders with us as we had sat stuffing envelopes on that night when we were getting the letters ready to go.
Julie Ellis (00:05:31) - We opened a bottle of cheap champagne and we toasted to the someday IPO of Mabel's labels. So flash forward, we are making labels in my, you know, sister in law's basement. And we were growing, the business was growing, and we one day the phone started ringing and ringing and ringing. And my sister in law finally, you know, found a few minutes when the kids were napping to run to her basement and answer that phone and. You know, people were asking if we were busy and she said, impossibly busy. How did you hear about us? And it turned out that a very small article, like one and a half by 2.5in that we got in Canadian Living magazine about six months before, had turned into us being featured on a subscriber newsletter called the Daily Candy. And we were the candy of the day. And suddenly the orders were pouring in and it took us several days. We had to take time off work, we had to gather up extra help, and we made labels for four days straight.
Julie Ellis (00:06:39) - And at the end, just before we dropped them all in the mailbox, we counted up all the envelopes and there'd been about 350 orders. So we quickly realized that our business was not ready for scaling, and we would need to make some process changes for how we were doing production to make it easier and faster. What we also found out later was that one of the people who got labels in that batch was a host of The View, and her name was Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and she was pregnant with her second child. And a number of months later, we came into the office on a Tuesday after a holiday weekend and to a message saying, we would like to feature. Elizabeth wants to feature your product in a baby shower segment where we'll be talking about her favorite products. So we very quickly made some labels for Baby Hasselbeck and posted them off to New York. And the labels were featured on The View, and there were about ten products that were featured. We found out later we were the only product that didn't have a public relations representative, so that was really interesting to us.
Julie Ellis (00:07:50) - But what happened after we were on TV that day was the biggest 24 hours in Mabel's label's sales history, and I think there were, you know, 8 or 900 orders. And so, you know, we were growing. And by the time we made it onto the view, we had decided that my sister in law should buy a bigger house so we could have a bigger basement for the business. And so she did. And when we moved in, um, we really hoped that Mabel would stay there for quite a long time. 3 or 5 years and 18 months later, we were bursting at the seams. We had 12 people coming to work every day in a very cramped basement with Wi-Fi that wasn't strong enough and kept cutting out. We had filled a good part of her upstairs with printed material and things we needed to run the business, and so we knew that we were going to need commercial space. So we moved to commercial space and, you know, the business kept growing. Um, we had an idea that was born of moms who said to us, but I need my labels.
Julie Ellis (00:08:50) - Today my kid is going to school or daycare or summer camp, and I need the labels now. And even with a mail order business, you know, we were shipping next day, but it took longer than that, even with overnight service. And so we had an idea that we could create a retail product that we would sell in some of the biggest retailers in the world. So we started trying to figure out we hand-made some prototypes, and we started going around to all of our suppliers, our contacts. We went to printing trade shows. We basically exhausted our address book of everyone we could think of who might be able to help. And the, you know, advice we got was fairly unanimous, and that was that we needed to look to China. Uh, we had never done any business in China. We were running our own factory with our own back end software that ran all of the production from the time, you know, you ordered on the website to the time it shipped out of our facility.
Julie Ellis (00:09:50) - And so the idea of going to China felt more than a little bit daunting. But we decided not to let fear win. And so we crafted a project plan and worked on getting samples. And so we had samples. We had gotten samples from three different factories, and we had hired, um, a consultant, a friend of a friend who had experience working in consumer packaged goods companies as well as retailers. And with a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, we got a meeting at Walmart, and so we went off to Walmart Canada in January to talk about setting up in back to school. And it was a cold winter day. Uh, the parking lot at Walmart Canada's head office here is notoriously bad for finding parking. It's not big enough. And the day we went, the snowstorm was so bad that we had no trouble parking whatsoever. And we went inside to do our pitch. You know, we told them the story of how we were moms. We started a business in a basement with a great idea.
Julie Ellis (00:10:58) - We, you know, became a social media powerhouse and, you know, celebrity endorsed brand. And that story was ours, and it was compelling to one of the buyers. And we had a little good cop and bad cop we had. I love these labels. These are the best. It's going to be wonderful compared to I don't think these things really work. And at the end of that meeting, they sort of gave us that, well, Back to school is closed and we don't see you getting in for this year, but we'll call you. And we were pretty deflated leaving that meeting what had seemed like a big win to get the meeting at all felt less than exciting as we walked out of the building that day. We waited for about a week and finally we got the call. We want you for back to school, and we want to put you in our stationery section year round, and you need to deliver your labels on June 12th. Well, it was the end of January and we sold this on samples, so we needed to get ourselves together and head off to figure out if we could find a track, a factory that would make these labels for us.
Julie Ellis (00:12:14) - By the end of February. One month later, we were on the ground in China, and as I stood in the middle of a busy train station, I realize that I didn't know the language. I did not know where I was going, and I had no idea if we were going to find a factory who could fill our order. The project plan in my backpack. It felt pretty inadequate. Uh, luckily, through great network of contacts, we had met some people in Hong Kong on our only day there who offered so kindly to help us. And so we had someone with us in that train station who helped us get into a taxi, helped us get to our hotel, and helped us find the translator we had hired to visit the factories with us. Honestly, none of that could have happened without our friend. And so we viewed factories and we found one. And you know what? We got those labels delivered to Walmart on time, crossed a vast ocean across our big country and into the Walmart distribution center.
Julie Ellis (00:13:23) - And we got those labels made and delivered on time. Um, it was a big accomplishment for us at Mabel's Labels, and it was a, um, a place where things could have so easily gone wrong because we were making, you know, a new product in a new country to us with a factory we had never worked with before, and we really didn't know how things would turn out. We also knew that we had a huge reputational risk on the line, because Walmart was well known for charging penalties if you didn't deliver on time. And, you know, if we couldn't deliver those labels, we'd be stuck with a lot of labels. We would have trouble selling and just that reputational hit. But we made it happen. And so that incident, uh, really made me start to think about goal setting. And that goal setting became more than just, you know, lists and checkboxes. I started to think of goals in a different way, where they were bigger and. A little more scary because you were taking on a lot of unknowns when you set that goal.
Julie Ellis (00:14:31) - And so those later I came in my life to call big, gorgeous goals. Um, so fast forward a few years beyond the Walmart sales, and we got a call one day asking us if we would be interested in selling our business. And although the business wasn't for sale, I think we were at a spot where, you know, we'd been at it for 12 years. We knew that the next level of the journey was going to require different skills, things we didn't have, people who weren't around us yet, those kinds of things. And so ultimately, when this offer came in, after a lot of discussion with them and a lot of work doing due diligence and actually getting the deal to close, we did sell the business to Avery Labels, and Avery is owned by a Canadian company, CCL industries, and it appealed to us because it was Canadian parent. They would leave the business in the building that we were currently in with the team that we currently had, and the business would continue to run and grow and flourish as a little tiny business within a much bigger business.
Julie Ellis (00:15:40) - And that was very, very appealing to us. What happened to me in that process? Well, I worked very hard in the acquisition phase. And as the, you know, day dawned after the deal was closed, I started to think about what I wanted from it, and I really didn't know. I think I was the person that, uh, would have never left, you know, would have been one of those founders taking up a boardroom, chatting with the staff over coffee and generally probably being disruptive. But it's where I probably would have landed. Uh, instead, after six months, I ended up out. Um, I left and, uh, it was hard. I think, um, when you're wired to climb for pinnacles. And we climbed and climbed and climbed at Mabel's Labels. When you find yourself on a plateau, it can be very unsettling and it can sort of upend your life. And it definitely upended mine. I took quite a bit of time to figure out what I would do next, and then I went and ran a business for somebody else.
Julie Ellis (00:16:50) - And I adored my team and I loved the experience. It was fabulous. But what I learned is that I don't want to work for somebody else. And so I decided that I would leave and start my own business doing advisory work. So I built a workshop around goal setting and took on some coaching clients, became a certified coach and started doing work with entrepreneurs. And over time, what I realized as I dipped my toe into the world of angel investing and worked with women entrepreneurs, you know, 1.9% of venture capital money goes to women. The stats are shocking. And when I talk to women who own businesses, I think we've seen needs in the world that don't necessarily fit into the culture that's been built in venture capitalism. And, you know, more businesses are started by women now. We've tipped over 50%. We don't grow them as big. And then we also don't get venture. Venture capital. So I started really thinking about like, what is it that makes some of us achieve really great things and others are left in the dust of their to do lists.
Julie Ellis (00:18:08) - And I interviewed as I wrote my book. I interviewed about 16 women. Um, and their stories are in the book of how they've done great and amazing things. And I learned a lot about, um, the need for people and process and systems to underpin people so that they have the ability to grow their business and they are able to delegate things and, you know, have all of those pieces moving together so they can grow and achieve amazing things. They also have to set goals where they don't know the outcome is going to be positive, where they feel uncertain, where they need money or expertise or, you know, something. There's some part of that goal that is an unknown. And so that's where I think big, gorgeous goals come into play. Um, after I wrote the book, I really started to focus my work into women entrepreneurs in that seven and eight figure of revenue range, because I think that getting to a million feels really hard. So if you're in the high sixes and you're trying to get to a million in revenue and it feels hard, you're in the right place.
Julie Ellis (00:19:22) - It feels hard and you put systems in place and you put people in place and you put processes in place, and you cross the million and it feels magical. And by the time you grow that 2 or 3 million, you hit another resistance point where a lot of those people, systems and processes start breaking and you need to change them out. And so that can be a major sort of plateau point of difficulty to recalibrate yourself and make some big changes to get on the climb again. And then, you know, when you cross ten, like getting getting from 7 to 10 can be really hard as well for similar reasons. And so what happened to people who did it and where did they get stuck and why? So I became really interested in this, and I started reaching out to my network and asking, you know, who do you know? And I've started talking to some amazing women, and I cannot wait to share them with you. As we go forward, we'll be accumulating lots of episodes and lots of different stories.
Julie Ellis (00:20:27) - And you know, we have a lot in common. A lot of the same things happen no matter what kind of business you have, whether you have a product, whether you have a service, whether you have a SaaS product, whether you, you know, have hardware business or software business. So many problems and walls that we hit, the hurdles we trip over. So many of them are the same. And then there are the interesting stories of the different ways people do it. And, um, there's just been so many interesting things about, you know, narrowing down your focus and staying with a few key things, um, how to hire people who, you know, might not typically be employable, how to, you know, what happens when you decide you want to sell your business and you want to exit and go do something else? What happens when you decide to build several smaller revenue businesses, um, and take the learnings and the knowledge from each of them and replicate those outward? What are all the different ways that we can grow our businesses, thrive in our businesses, and really climb together.
Julie Ellis (00:21:39) - So I look forward to sharing those stories with you. I want to hear from you. Are you a seven or an eight figure entrepreneur? Do you know a woman or someone female identifying that would like to be interviewed and would be a great story to tell? I'd love to hear from you. I want to cover stories of all kinds of different people who have done all kinds of different things, and I'm super excited about it. So I hope you're going to join me for the Figure Eight podcast, and I'll talk to you soon. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please remember to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. So you won't miss any episodes. Figure Eight isn't just a podcast, it's a way of seeing the big, gorgeous goals of women entrepreneurs coming to life. If you're interested in learning more, you can find my book, Big Gorgeous Goals on Amazon anywhere you might live. For more about my growth and leadership training programs, visit www.julieellis.ca to see how we might work together. Read my blog or sign up to get your free diagnostic.
Julie Ellis (00:23:01) - Are you ready for growth? Once again, that's Julie Ellis.ca. When we work together, we all win. See you again soon for another episode of Figure Eight.