cc >> Jeanan Yasiri: This is
Entrepreneurship in Society. It's a course that's
offered through the University of Wisconsin
School of Human Ecology. I'm Jeanan Yasiri.
As we begin today, I'd like to extend thanks
to our partners in supporting this course, the UW Office of
Corporate Relations, the UW College of Engineering for their
technical support and financial support from the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation which is committed to advancing academic
education in entrepreneurship. Additionally we'd like to thank
our media partners, Wisconsin Public Television and their
University Place crew for taping today's lecture.
I am very pleased to introduce our special guest this
afternoon, Catherine Hooper president of Black Umbrella
based in both New York City and Los Angeles.
Catherine began the development process for Black Umbrella in
the wake of Hurricane Katrina when she realized the need for
a mainstream preparedness company to serve not only
her family but every family. She deepened her understanding
of preparedness through training and first aid,
self-defense, and survival psychology and formed
relationships with decorated law enforcement and first
responders across the nation. She also began a master's degree
in emergency management. Catherine is a life long
entrepreneur with a track record of successful investments in
businesses, as diverse as Blow Styling Salon,
the first salon to establish the everyday grooming category.
Urban Angler, a globally recognized fly fishing brand,
and Able Automatics, a precision machine shop.
In 2010, Black Umbrella began serving clients in New York and
Los Angeles with in-home visits and conducting services
by telephone nationwide. Catherine regularly speaks about
preparedness at public and private venues and donates
the company's services to families in need.
Please join me in welcoming Catherine Hooper as she talks
with us about her experience as an entrepreneur and developing
Black Umbrella. [APPLAUSE]
>> Catherine Hooper: I spoke with a group of Girl Scouts
last Friday. They were second-
and third-grade girls. I think their attention span
was about 10 minutes. I think you all
are 16th graders, 17th graders, something
like that, so I'm hoping if we extrapolate that out,
your attention span will be about 40 minutes.
I'll talk during that time and then you should have plenty of
time to ask me any questions that you'd like based on the
things that I'm talking about or anything else.
The Girl Scouts is not my only venue, as Jeanan had mentioned
in her introduction. I speak regularly at companies
and organizations about the five steps for making
your family's emergency plan. And when Jeanan got in touch
with me and said, we'd love to have you come here and speak at
the University of Wisconsin, I knew this wasn't the talk she
was looking for, so I asked her, well, what is your audience
interested in hearing if it's not that?
And she said what we're really interested in hearing is about
entrepreneurship, and what are the things that you as an adult
in the entrepreneurial world would like to, would hope that
someone would have shared with you when you were an
undergraduate. When you were the person sitting
in the seats. The things I wish someone had
said to me when I was an undergraduate could probably
fill several books, in fact they have filled several books, so in
addition to talking to you today and giving you what I think
are the three most important qualities to bring to your
entrepreneurial career, I'm also going to be giving you some
titles of books that are a real asset going forward as an
entrepreneur. So how many of you have already
been involved in a business on an entrepreneurial level?
You've either started a business, been a partner in a
business? And paper routes count.
So, okay. And how many of you intend to do
that in the future? Are thinking about doing some
entrepreneurial? Great.
So some of the things I'm going to say today may sound like
things you've heard before, but what you're going to hear is all
of these ideas and lessons as they've applied in my
entrepreneurial story. Growing up, I was always the kid
with the lemonade stand, but that did not mean that as an
adult that I thought I had a future as an entrepreneur.
When I was your age and into my early adulthood, what was really
important to me in my career was to be of service.
I felt as though I may have certain gifts and the best thing
that I could do was bring those gifts to bear in the form of a
contribution to the larger world.
So my first job out of college was as a writer at an ivy league
university working for the president, for the deans, and
for some of the high-level faculty to help them compose
the letters, the speeches, the talking points that they
would use in speaking with major donors.
So I felt as though I had this skill set in writing and a real
interest in writing, and I was going to use that interest in
writing to help this university raise money.
And I thought this would be a wonderful contribution.
Now, this job had a very interesting task that was part
of it. It was a fascinating task and it
was something I was completely unprepared for.
So I, as a person who was charged with writing a letter
to a wealthy donor, one of the things I had to do was go to the
school's research library and read everything about that
individual. That may start with their
initial application to college. It might include some of their
course work while they were at the school.
Their grade transcripts, letters that they wrote to various
faculty members over the years, all of the press clippings about
their career. And as I continued in this job
and began to read more and more of these life stories of people
that had been incredible successes, what I recognized
is that all of my expectations about the entrepreneurial
success were completely wrong. I was completely wrong.
My assumption was that if you were going to be a success
as an entrepreneur, you probably started out from a great
background. You probably had a trust fund.
You probably came from an entrepreneurial family.
You probably had excellent grades.
And as I began reading more and more about these individuals,
what I came to recognize is that these people were not
disproportionately the best students.
They were not disproportionately the people with the privileged
backgrounds. What they were, were
risk-takers. These people had a certain
fearlessness. And I think that fearlessness is
probably one of the first things that you can bring into your
entrepreneurial career to help you achieve the things that you
want to achieve. I want to give you one example.
One of the people that I wrote a letter to, that I was in charge
of writing to, is someone that you've probably all read about
in the Wall Street Journal. He worked as a caddy to make
enough money to go to college, just like in the movie, and
once he was in school, and he wanted to work
on a hedge fund on Wall Street. He was fascinated with a
particular hedge fund manager. So he wrote him a letter
and said you don't know me, you don't know anything about
me, but I've read about your career, I'm fascinated about you
and I want to work for you. I'll do anything.
I will clean the toilets and I'll empty the waste pails and
I'll do whatever it takes to be in your orbit.
Today that fund is named for both the original founder
and that letter-writer. And he's considered to be
one of the best stock pickers on Wall Street.
He didn't get there because he came from a great background,
he got great grades. What he brought to that was the
willingness to be the guy that wrote the letter.
So that's something that I hope all of you will incorporate into
your thinking about your future. Being that person who is willing
to pick up the phone, willing to write the email, willing to
write the letter. And I don't want to spend the
rest of this talk on fearlessness, because there is a
great book on fearlessness by 50 Cent, as you know, one of
the intellectual luminaries of our day.
But this is a fabulous book. And it explores this concept of
fearlessness again and again in ways that are very creative,
and I think an asset to any entrepreneur.
So by the way, as I said I'm going to talk for 40 minutes,
but if any of you have a question as I'm speaking in the
middle, please don't hesitate to raise your hand.
So hearing these stories of other people's lives, hearing
about their successes, led me to look for an entrepreneurial
career of my own. And I want to say something
about service. As you know, I got involved in
that work because I wanted to be of service.
And what I came to realize is that the people who had gone on
to found companies, employ hundreds of people, and make
millions of dollars were able to do with one check what
I probably was not going to be able to do in my entire
service career. I wanted to have that kind of
power and I came to recognize that doing good and doing well
did not have to be opposites. Those two things could be linked
and that you could bring a service aspect to anything
that you wanted to achieve. So taking off from these
lessons, I decided that I wanted to buy a business
and I identified the business that I wanted to buy.
And it was a retail store. I had a lot of fear in
approaching the owner about her willingness to sell to me, but,
you know, I finally made that call.
A friend gave me a great piece of advice.
My friend said anybody you call is lucky.
And I love that idea, that I had all this fear about calling her,
but that in fact she was lucky to be getting a call from
somebody who wanted to buy her company.
So knowing that I was going to buy this retail business and
striking the deal, I proceeded to take every class I could find
in retail accounting, retail logistics, merchandising,
inventory. I read every book I could find,
and cobbled together really my own little education
about retailing. And I had so much enthusiasm
for this business. I was so excited that it was
devastating to me when the seller pulled out of the deal
at the 11th hour. She really decided that she
wanted to leave the business to her son, so here I was,
kind of all dressed up and no place to go.
And I was devastated. At this point, the story is
going to take this hockey stick turn.
Given that I had this disappointment and given that
I wasn't going to buy this business, I decided that what I
should do was take a lesson from the writer, Elizabeth Gilbert.
Do any of you know, now she's a famous writer, she wrote a book
called "Eat, Pray, Love." At the time she had written
a little article about fly fishing for bone fish
in Venezuela. I thought that's what I'm going
to do, I'm going to go away for five days, learn to fly fish
and get my mind off of about how upset I am
about this business completely, reorient my thinking
and have this vacation. Do any of you fish?
Is anybody here into fishing? Yes, okay, great.
So one of the things that's interesting about fishing
is that it does really kind of reorient your thinking.
If you know any fisherman, they have to show you their fishing
pictures. So this is my fishing picture
from my first trip to Venezuela. Needless to say, I fell
completely in love with fly fishing.
And decided it was something that I wanted to pursue,
not just on this one trip, but in the future.
So I came to New York and I visited for the first time
the retail store that had put together that trip for me.
And when I walked in, I realized that this business, it's called
Urban Angler in Manhattan, this business had all of the
attributes that I had seen and loved about my first
opportunity. It had an amazing clientele.
It had an incredible market. Urban Angler is the only
fly fishing store in all of New York City, in the five
boroughs of New York City. So 20 million people, one store.
It's just an incredible opportunity.
It also had the pieces that made it worth buying.
For instance, the ownership was a little bit tired of running
the company. The inventory was old.
The business was dusty, it was stale.
It was ripe for reinvention. So within about a year of
stumbling upon this business in a way that I had not
anticipated, at all, I became an owner of the company.
And, in fact, we did reinvent it.
So we moved the store to Fifth Avenue.
We remerchandised and built this beautiful boutique location for
our clientele that really suited the price point, that suited the
market, and we were able to expand the business.
We developed a mail order division, but before I get kind
of caught up in talking about the successes of that business,
I want to make sure that I let you all know about my biggest
mistake with this business. And hopefully save you from this
same mistake. Do you see these big fish
up here? I don't think I have a pointer.
These big things? So the person who hung those
on the wall on the ladder with the level, that was me.
And all of these shirts, I folded every one of those
shirts. I bought this rug.
I laid the rug, all these rugs I put together.
I mean, there was no part of this business that I didn't
touch with my own hands. When the boxes came in,
I unpacked all the boxes. I did all the receiving.
I put all the price tags on. Every aspect of the business,
I touched. And that was probably good in
the beginning, but I was unable to let go.
So I was involved in this business for about nine years.
And I spent six of those years working in the business,
not on the business. What's working on the business?
It's opening a new location. It's finding new ways to develop
your commission structure so you achieve greater sales.
Developing a mail order line. Expanding your business through
social media. There's a million ways to work
on the business that have nothing to do with folding
shirts. So eventually I realized that
I could hire someone for minimum wage to ring up customers, that
I could hire great salespeople to sell, that I could hire
people to do these functions that I knew how to do
and I could work on growing the company.
And I can't say enough about that.
I think it's the classic entrepreneurial mistake.
I'm not alone in thinking that. This is a book.
Have any of you read this book? "The E myth"?
This is all about the concept of working on the business,
not in the business. Right?
If you have a bakery, don't be the one who bakes the pies.
Be the one that expands it to 15 locations across your city.
So this book is on that topic, and it's an excellent book for
helping you focus your thinking on ways to work
on your business. I sold my equity in--
Oh, let me backtrack, because this is really where the seeds
of Black Umbrella began, as Jeanan mentioned.
In 2005, I took a short break from the business because
I had a baby. And my daughter was born
in the early part of 2005. Hurricane Katrina hit
in September of 2005. And at that time, as I was
watching this devastation unfold on television, as so many people
were, one part of me was thinking, I can't believe people
didn't get out. I can't believe people didn't
have a plan. And another part of me
was thinking, I live in New York City.
I have no plan. What if we were to have another
terrorist attack, what if we were to have a natural disaster
like that? Would I really be the smart one
that got out? Or would I be the person
standing on the roof having to have the helicopter rescue me?
So Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call for me in terms
of having an emergency plan and a sense of self sufficiency.
And as I began using the resources that are available
from FEMA, from the New York City Office of Emergency
Management, from the Red Cross, what I realized was that while
there was a tremendous amount of great information out there,
there were very few best practices.
So while you might say, I don't know if you have this in
Madison, but in New York City we have on the sides of buses
and bus shelters, everywhere you look, Public Service
Announcements that say make a plan, get a kit, be informed.
The federal government is relying on all of us to be able
to be self sufficient for three days in an emergency.
Yet, I had no idea how to make that plan.
What did that entail? What was the first step,
what was the second step? So in making a plan for my
family, I had to build that set of best practices.
And once I had done that, I thought this is a complete
waste of energy for this just to benefit me.
This should be able to benefit all families that are interested
in doing this. I should have a way to
disseminate this in a broader way.
And that's where the idea of Black Umbrella was born.
So after I had developed this methodology, I hired someone to
go and do this methodology for the numerous friends and family
members who said, wow, you found a way to do that for yourself,
can someone come do it for me? Do you know anyone that can help
me? I sent this woman to many
different households, to try out the methodology, find out what
worked and what didn't, and get a sense of the efficacy
of a service like this. And at that time, remember,
I had a new baby, I had Urban Angler.
I was developing some interest in other small businesses,
it was not the time for me to launch that company.
But that didn't mean that I didn't get a toe hold in and get
the plan written and keep all of that information.
So something that, you know, you might hear because you're
young people or because you're interested in entrepreneurial
things, I heard all the time from the time I started Black
Umbrella till I launched in 2010, well, you know,
when are you going to do that? You really need to follow
through with that. Well, I did follow through,
it just took me, depending on how you count it, between three
and five years. The reason I'm telling you that
is that as entrepreneurs, you're going to have hundreds
of amazing ideas. You're going to have so many
great ideas that you don't have time to get them all off the
ground. And there's nothing wrong with
that. Those ideas may come back into
your life at a certain time, or they may not, but in any case
having the great ideas and maybe not bringing them all the way to
fruition is not a bad thing. So it's worth keeping those
ideas, keeping the packet on the shelf.
As I did with Black Umbrella. So as I said, I developed all of
the resources for building Black Umbrella and it wasn't
until I sold my equity in Urban Angler in 2009
that I was able to begin building the infrastructure
of the company in a real way, incorporating, hiring employees.
This was a new venture, because I had been involved in a retail
business with the doors open, where people came in
all day long. I always had something to do,
and all of a sudden I had a start-up.
At first, I was just operating out of my home office.
And, although, I had built up demand and clients that were
interested and although I was beginning to hire employees and
although I had lots of help in terms of infrastructure, I had
a new task as an entrepreneur, which was not necessarily to be
the one working on the business, but the one who did
the execution. So execution is the difference
between success and failure. All of you will have good ideas,
but you don't need to have a good idea.
All you need is to be able to execute on your idea.
We all look at something like, what's the blanket
with the sleeves? The Snuggie.
So we all look at an idea like that and say, how did that
happen? How did somebody invent this
thing that is maybe just a robe backwards, or it's not
necessarily the most exciting idea anyone has ever come up
with. The difference between someone
who makes a success of that business and someone who has a
really great idea that goes nowhere is all in the execution.
It's entirely in the execution. So there are different
methodologies for being good at execution.
One I particularly like is in this book by Scott Belsky,
called "Making Ideas Happen." Now this book is written
primarily for creatives, it's written for graphic designers,
architects, people who are very project-based.
And they need to count on themselves in order
to push their ideas forward. You as entrepreneurs have the
same task. You are the ones in charge of
pushing your ideas forward. And there will be so many
distractions for you, even as young people perhaps without
families yet, you've got a big social life and a million
distractions and that just keeps going the further along you get
in life. So Scott Belsky's book is
about how to distance yourself from those distractions, have
your ultimate goal, break that down into smaller steps, break
that down into action items and then conduct all of your
business with that bias towards action that allows you to
execute on your ideas. He speaks quite regularly, and
if any of you are interested, you have the opportunity
to see him speak. But I want to wrap up today by
talking about the one thing that I hope you take away from this
talk, which I think is the most important message for you
as young entrepreneurs. It's that piece of advice that
that friend gave me. Anybody you call is lucky.
Now, when I got that advice, we didn't live in the world
of email yet. We certainly didn't live in the
world of Facebook and Twitter, but it's a very important idea.
All of us may read about somebody in the paper or
in a magazine or see someone on television and think, I admire
that person. I would love to talk to that
person. I'd love to get to know them.
But they seem as though they're in another world, they're in
another plateau. That's absolutely not true.
Even this, you know, someone like Steve Jobs, may get
hundreds of emails or letters or phone calls a day.
But if you kind of carve out the people who are maybe a little
bit crazy and you just focus on the people who have a legitimate
interest who are smart and who have something clear to ask,
then it's a very small number. I can tell you of my own
experience in reaching out to anyone who has ever been
interesting to me, you'd be surprised how often you get an
email back almost immediately and I wouldn't be here speaking
with you today if Jeanan hadn't written me and asked me to come
and it so happened that it worked for me to be able to do
that. So I encourage you to have that
fearlessness and I encourage you to work on your businesses and
I encourage you to be good at execution.
But the first and foremost part is don't be afraid to be the
person who picks up the phone call.
And to that end, I hope you all will make me lucky by getting in
touch with me. So who has questions?
>> The students know that I walk around with a mic
I'll just hand it off to them. I appreciate your comment about
not being fearful of reaching out to people who you may not
know and admiring them or folks that you may admire.
We were talking about networking last week and I had a very
similar message in terms of you never know who wants to meet you
and especially students. Can you think of somebody that
you reached out to that might have surprised you at one point?
>> Oh, well, okay. There's a woman named
Linda Resnick Probably none of you have
heard of her, but you've all used her products.
She owns Fiji Water. She owns Teleflora.
She owns Palm Juice. She's an amazing woman.
She happens to also be a self-made billionaire.
She's very beautiful and young and inspirational.
I read a profile of her in New York magazine.
I kind of set it aside and I thought, I hope I meet this
woman one day. And within a couple of months
I got invited to a lunch in New York called
the Power Lunch for Women, when a friend said, could you
please come and be my date, and when I got there,
Linda was the honoree. And I thought, this is--
very often when we send these wishes out to the universe, I
don't know how this works on the level of physics, but they come
back to us. So although she was the honoree
and she was surrounded by people the entire time, I felt it was
very important that since she had been put in my path that I
had to go over and say hello to her.
So I introduced myself and I said, maybe a sentence about me
and what an impression her career had made on me.
And her immediate response was, I live in Los Angeles and do you
think if you're in Los Angeles, would you come to my house and
visit me? And so that was an amazing
invitation. And I did visit her in
Los Angeles a few months later. She has a spectacular home and
she's an amazing inspirational person.
But, you know, one of the things that you find about someone
like that you admire, is that they're very normal,
they're very ordinary. And they are just as interested
in you as you are interested in them.
I don't know anything about the backgrounds of each of you
as individuals, but if you put yourselves in the shoes of
someone like that, someone who's self-made, incredibly wealthy,
has all of these assets to invest, what are they looking
for? They're looking for you.
They're looking for young, exciting energy.
People with ideas. People with the excitement
to carry out a project. So you represent something that
they might not have anymore in the same way that they used to,
and that's something that all of you can capitalize on.
>> Hi, my name is Jewel Rose. I'm curious a little bit about
Black Umbrella. Do you work with even like
smaller scale emergency plans, like say, someone's like the
father of the family dies. Do you work on things like that,
or is it just not even natural disasters, but large scale
disasters? >> Yes, in fact, most people,
most of our clients do not like to think about something like
tsunami, earthquake, tsunami, nuclear disaster.
That's not the type of stuff they want to deal with, even
though that may be the eventual goal of the plan, to be
protected from a very large disaster.
Our focus is the steps that you can take on an everyday level
to help you no matter what happens.
So, for instance, all of us go through personal tragedies,
like bankruptcy, losing a job, divorce.
And it's amazing how the steps that you can use to protect
yourself from something like a hurricane Katrina are the same
set of steps that would be useful in some of those personal
emergencies. Something that we do with our
clients that is really suited to the type of tragedy that you're
talking about is we do critical document storage and
organization. So when we go to the client's
home, we have a computer, we have a scanner, and we take all
of the client's identification, birth certificates, passports,
Social Security cards, all that type of basic identification,
plus life insurance policies, wills, trust agreements, the
power of attorney, all those important documents and scan
them and save them onto an encrypted flash drive and every
member of the family has that all the time.
So wherever you are, you have an encrypted flash drive that has
all of these critical documents on it.
And in a worst case scenario, if you lost a spouse or lose an
important relative, you have copies of all of these things
and you don't have to spend the first two months after you've
lost this person trying to assemble all those documents
that you're going to need to carry out and execute their
will. >> Hi Catherine, my name is
Yvette. >> Hi, Yvette.
>> I was just wondering, how do you market this product without
exploiting people's fears. I mean, this is a product that
people-- >> That's a great question.
>> In a sense, can do on their own.
>> Yeah. So we have three core values at
Black Umbrella and one of them is confidence, not fear.
And I just did an interview for "Redbook" last Friday.
And the interviewer at the end of the interview said, well,
I haven't done any of these steps that you're talking about.
I haven't taken any of these steps.
So now I feel really afraid. And what I said to her was, you
would feel so much less afraid if you do these things that are
in your own interest. If you'd take these steps to
building a plan. The example I used is that when
we see the sprinkler system or we see fire extinguishers, we
don't look at something like that, a fire extinguisher,
and say, oh, that makes me afraid of fire.
You think, oh, that makes me feel confident that if a fire
were to break out, there's a fire extinguisher right there.
So we really don't intend to market or try to market through
fear. We try to market through the
peace of mind that you have once you've taken these steps that
are good for you. >> Hi, my name is Alyssa,
I'm from New York, so thank you for coming here.
>> Hi Alyssa. What part of New York are you
from? >> West Chester.
[LAUGHTER] Two questions, the first one
is, you've described to us and also in your bio, you have
a long track of entrepreneurial ideas and successes.
Do you think that Black Umbrella is the end of your track, or do
you want to continue and dabble in other areas?
That's the first question. >> Well, you know, you never
know what's down the road. I'm really happy to be focused
on Black Umbrella right now. It's not the only company in
which I have my hand right now. But if this were the last
business that I worked on for let's say another ten or
15 years, that would not feel, that would not feel complete.
So what I really hope to do, and what I think all of us are
interested in doing is taking the things that we've learned
and using them to help other people.
So if Black Umbrella was the last company that I worked on,
it certainly wouldn't be the last project, because I would
want to continue to reach out to people and share things that
I've learned and help them on their paths.
>> And the second question. >> Sure.
>> I was on your website and I was noticing the prices.
Do you think, or what's your experience with people who are
looking into your business and think that it's a great
idea, but don't necessarily have the money to come up with a
plan, because a plan should be for everyone.
>> Absolutely. >> Everyone is just as
vulnerable to tragic events. >> Let me go back to that
interview that I did in "Redbook" last week.
This is exactly why I do interviews like that.
I was on "Dateline" last week, and I don't know if any of you
saw me. But the thing I say again and
again is you don't need me to do this.
Right? Just like you don't need a
personal trainer if you want to do sit-ups.
You can make a plan for yourself without my services.
My services are there for the people that are having a really
hard time doing this for themselves and they have the
assets to hire somebody to help them.
It would be my dream if people, if everyone did this and there
was a culture of preparedness in this country like you see in
other countries where people are far more self-sufficient and
far more capable of surviving calamities.
So that's a great question. And as I said, whenever
someone gets in touch with me, which they do frequently, asking
about our services and say, you know, I don't have really
have the money, I was just emailing with someone today.
I was saying, okay, here's how you do this without me.
Here's something you can do today, take this step and then
email me back. >> Catherine, I'm thinking about
the group and I'm going to ask about Black Umbrella.
The folks that you are serving don't want to proactively
think about these kinds of things.
So how do you find your customers?
Is it advertising, is it word of mouth?
>> It's all word of mouth. Right now it's all word of
mouth. We do a tiny bit of advertising,
but it's mostly, someone asks me for their charity journal ad and
I want to help them out. Our business operates
by word of mouth, primarily because once you get one family
to go through the process and they have such a positive
experience, they leave having built this plan on this real
kind of high of confidence, then they talk to all their
friends about it. And another great piece of
marketing that's kind of embedded in the plan
is our wallet cards. I don't know if any of you saw
these on our website. I can show you one or pass it
around. But we make for all of our
clients a wallet card with their family crisis management team
and all of their numbers on the back.
And everyone, even my six-year-old carries one in her
backpack to school. And when people see that card,
this beautiful black anodized card with the family's name on
it, whether they're in line at the grocery store or at an event
and someone pulls out their wallet, the people around them
say what's that. I want one of those.
And I can't tell you how many people call us and say I saw
someone who had that card and I want to have that card.
So the marketing aspect is really word of mouth.
And, you know, we have looked at ways of advertising, but to your
point, it is really difficult to find out how to create an ad
that doesn't have pictures of mushroom clouds or volcanoes in
it. You know, that's not the way we
want to market, so word of mouth has really suited us.
>> One of the other things that you mentioned in the course of
your presentation that I found really interesting and a bit
inspiring on a personal level was the fact that you, and I
don't remember exactly the words that you used, but you said
there came a point when you were with Urban Angler where you
realized you really needed to be hiring other people
to do certain tasks. Can you tell us about
that story? What became the critical moment
where you realized, I'm wasting my time where I could be doing
something else? Was there something, a tipping
point for you in a form? >> I'm not sure if there was a
tipping point, but I think, I don't know how many of you
studied accounting or how many of you studied finance, but when
I look at a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet,
those tell you a story about the business.
And when I looked at our ratios of our expenses as related to
similar businesses, what I saw were the ways we were
underspending and overspending in various categories.
And that tells you what you need to do with the business.
And I also, you know, a tipping point certainly occurs when you
realize how much of your personal life and the fun things
that you like to do on the weekends are being taken away
from you because you need to go into the office and relabel,
you know, 1,500 units of hooks. That's not fun.
So when you're faced with that, you do look at it and think, how
can I retool this business to give me more of the things
I want and less of the things I don't.
>> One thing that we try to talk about a little bit this semester
has to do with mentors. Have you had a mentor and how
important have those people been in advancing your
entrepreneurial career? >> Well, I want to say that
I would love to answer this question by telling you that I
have had so many inspiring women in my life, but that doesn't
happen to be the case, probably because of the nature of some of
the businesses that I've been involved in.
I do have some women, Linda Resnick being an example
and a few other notable examples.
But it's really, the men who were my main clients at Urban
Angler, these were guys who were successes in whatever they did,
whether they were a fashion photographer or they worked on
Wall Street or they were an environmentalist.
They were the type of people that were the success stories
of their industries. And one of the things I noticed
about them through years of interacting with them at the
business is that they were the farthest thing from
perfectionists. They were very happy to not
allow good to get in the way of perfect, as you might have heard
people say before. And that really helped me
distance myself from those kind of everyday tiny details of the
business that I should have been farming out in the first place.
>> I really appreciate that revelation, too.
And I think, while certainly as women we always look to find
strong female role models, especially to connect with the
other women in our life, very often our mentors will be
a man or a woman. And I certainly know that
I've had that same experience. You know, Alyssa asked a
question that is a bit similar to this, but I'm going to watch
for additional hands for any final questions, but my final
question to you would be, how do you see service translating in
your life in the future given the fact that it is so important
to you and you've really built this business around it?
>> I have built this business around and I don't want to
pretend in any way that my business is not a for-profit
entity. Black Umbrella is, you know,
it's a for-profit business. We're there to make money,
but the service component is, I mean, I think it's interwoven
into how all of us live our everyday lives and it's
certainly interwoven into how you run your business.
So service can be giving away your services to a family
that needs you. I'll give you an example.
We had a family that I knew that was involved with a
terrible fire in their apartment building.
They needed to evacuate. They left with nothing.
And they needed to get completely reestablished.
And that's not a point in their life where they can afford to be
buying our services, but it's a point in their life where
they're realizing all of a sudden how necessary they are.
So being able to give them our services as a pro bono effort
on our part feels really good, feels really valuable because
these are people that needs that so much.
But service extends into how you treat your employees, how you
street your vendors. How you make the everyday
decisions that you make in the business.
So, for instance, we come in contact with so much sensitive
information about our clients through this process and
obviously our clients are aware that we would never sell
or trade that information. But they're aware of that not
just we say it explicitly but because of how our specialists
interact with them and operate in the home.
So I think service, it kind of seeps in to all these little
cracks and crevasses and you feel it from the business,
as you have something to do with it.
I mean, all of us, you've probably all been in a
restaurant, walked into a restaurant where you can tell
everyone hates working there. You can tell the boss is a jerk
because of how everybody's acting.
So the hope is that doing the right thing from the top and
on down permeates and gives customers that great feeling.
>> Hi, my name is Tyler. I was wondering, your
entrepreneurial pursuits really range a wide variety of markets
from retail to emergency preparedness.
How did your interest and educational background kind of
play into that and how did you tie them altogether and take
these different steps in these different businesses?
>> I love that question, because there's no good answer so I have
to think of something new every time someone asks it.
Sometimes when we look, I'm not that old.
I'm 38. But sometimes when you look back
through time, it's much easier to see that red thread than it
was as you were kind of moving through all those steps.
So I went to Bryn Mawr College and my area of focus
was urban planning. And I didn't think I was ever
going to be an urban planner, I was just fascinated
with urban planning. And I really enjoyed it.
And then when I went to my first conference of emergency managers
for Black Umbrella, everyone there was an urban planner.
And I realized that this set of interests had kind of followed
me throughout my career, even though I wasn't particularly
focused on it all that time. So one of the things that made
my fishing business, made Urban Angler a big success
was the amount of kind of conversation and cross
pollination that happened between the clients
when they came into the store. So you might have 15 or 20
different people in the store at any given time from all the
walks of life, and yet they all had this common passion.
So there was kind of a coffee house atmosphere and there was
a lot of conversation and relationships being formed and
people that never knew each other or lived in other parts of
the world meeting in Alaska and going fishing together because
they had met at Urban Angler. I love that.
I love that excitement and energy of people connecting.
And that has to do with urban planning.
And it certainly has to do with the psychology and the sentiment
that comes out of disaster recovery.
So I lived in New York after 9/11 and the spirit and the
energy of people connecting to one another at that time
really shared, and had some commonalities there.
>> Any final questions for Catherine?
Well, I know the students join me in thanking you so very much
for traveling in from New York to be with us today.
And you're always welcome back here in Wisconsin.
>> Thank you. >> Thanks very much.
>> Thank you, thank you. [APPLAUSE]