Building in Public #7: Battling with self-imposed pressure
A recap of what's happened while building Mane Hook-Up.
Hey there 👋🏾,
For those of you who are short on time, here are the sections of the newsletter you can skip ahead to…
Progress🏅: Landing a double page spread in UKs biggest Black hair magazine
Problems🤕: A teary self-imposed pressure overload
Plans💡: Raising 2k for our charity event venue
🎯 The founder paradox: pressure doesn’t always = progress
Pressure doesn't just make diamonds, it cracks them too 😅.
I learned this the hard way when after putting a tonne of pretty unnecessary pressure on myself to get things done perfectly for a few weeks. Funnily enough, I have never considered myself a perfectionist (especially when I live by done is better than perfect lol), but over the past few weeks, I have wanted the chips to land perfectly in place.
While I’m sensing this is partly coming from a place of fatigue (i.e. exhaustion knocks down my ability to deal with stress/set-backs so I want a more ideal outcome), I quickly found that all this does is eat away at my self-esteem and undermine any great progress that’s been made — which you’ll see, there has been a tonne of in the past couple of weeks.
Fortunately, I have an amazing team of advisors who picked me up when I felt down and now (with a better perspective) I can see just how far we’ve come.
That said, here’s a recap of the best and most challenging things that have happened in the past two weeks — let me know what you think in the comments.
🏅 Progress
Getting the ball rolling for our charitable event
Last year, I decided there would be an element of social good woven into Mane Hook-Up.
It’s something that I thought about for a long time. Ever since I worked for a company that gave 10% of its profits to charities every year, I wanted to find a way to give back to our community in a meaningful way.
That has turned into a series of charity events, launched to help Black and Mixed-race children in foster care get access to free hair care, products and hair education. We were fortunate enough to team up with a Braiding Academy to run two pilot events in Leicester and London.
My mission, since announcing the event about four weeks ago, has been to get all of the pieces of the puzzle in place. That meant everything from finding enough hair stylists and barbers to sourcing product partnerships and raising the money to get the event done.
Four weeks in and we have:
💰 Secured an incredible venue in Central London at 50% off
🧴 Secured product donations from 4x brands and we’re in conversations with 2x others
🪮 Had 18 talented stylists and barbers register their interest in the event
🚸 Started working with two local councils and a foster care agency to get children registered for the day
📻 Gotten 1x radio interview to spread the word and we’re in the process of securing a few more
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With so much time and energy going into the event, a lot of people have asked me how this plays a role in growing Mane Hook-Up as a business (especially when we’re doing this at such a young stage).
The reality is, this doesn’t directly impact our growth, but it does allow us to have a significant impact on the community of people who will use us now and in the future. Our objective is to serve our community, gaining their support and respect in return.
For me, growth is a bi-product of being of service to the people who need you the most. That means doing things now that will have an impact much further down the line.
TIP FOR RUNNING MID-SIZE EVENTS: Overestimate everything. From the budget, to the number of people you'll need on the day and the size of amount of food you'll need. It is better to overestimate slightly and have more than you need than not have enough. Brand coverage overload: magazine spread, IWD speaking event booked + 2x podcast interviews locked in
For the past 18 months, I’ve spent a considerate amount of time and energy into building my profile as a Founder (and by extension, getting more coverage for Mane Hook-Up).
This has led to a lot of online coverage (which I’m always grateful for) but this double page spread in the February/March issue of Black Hair & Beauty Magazine, is the first time I’ve gained a spot in print 🥹.
And it means a lot for a few reasons. One, I read this salon practically every time I got my hair done as I was growing up. So, it’s a bit of a full circle moment to be featured (and named on the front cover 🤯).
Two, it feels like the work that I’ve put into my brand has somewhat started to pay off. Whether its through features like this one, or the International Women’s Day panel that I was asked to join in March, or the podcasts that have cropped up more often over the past few months, it feels like there is a lot of movement in the right direction when it comes to my personal brand moving the needle for the business.
Not to mention, this really doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m naturally a very private person lol so the idea of bearing my soul on the internet doesn’t appeal to me in any way at all. So, for a long time, while I knew being the face of the business would help, I fought against it to be as behind the scenes as possible. But, I’ve realised that there’s fine line between sharing to help others and over sharing.
Sharing to provide value and help others is key (much like the reason I started this newsletter in the first place). When you do that, people will naturally gravitate towards you and stick around for the ride.
TIP FOR GETTING PRESS COVERAGE: If you're in the UK, there's a great tool called Editorelle - you get instant notifications with an overview of stories that journalists in different industries are looking to cover. Subscription is all of £10/m and very worth it if you're strapped for time to do outreach and want to look for an easy way to gradually build relationships with journalists and editors. . Is this helpful? Share the Inside Small Giants newsletter with your community.
🤕 Problems
Self-imposed pressure overload
I’ve realised that we’ve started to crack the code with content for Mane Hook-Up. It’s just been performing much better than usual lately.
But, we’re increasing the volume (think 5x Instagram / TikTok posts a week, 1x podcast episode a week and 2x blog posts a month), and with this sea of content to forge my way through, I got to Wednesday and felt pretty overwhelmed.
So much so, that what started as a quick catch-up with one of my advisors, turned into me having a teary meltdown, and getting some words of encouragement to put me back together again 😭.
But, it wasn’t just the never ending stream of content that got to me.
I felt like I was fighting a losing battle.
One where I was failing more often that I was winning. Where I felt like I was taking two step backwards instead of forwards. And, where my self-worth was tied up in the perfect, idyllic outcomes.
All of that mounting pressure led to one thing. Tears. And, lots of them.
It’s funny that you can outwardly have a great week but hit a low so quickly. When you care deeply about solving a major problem in the world, all you really want to do is create change and make things better. Sometimes, I find myself wanting that change to happen immediately lol. Whether it’s making an announcement, posting content or sharing an idea, I’m waiting for those moment that the tide changes and Mane Hook-Up is transforming every inch of the textured hair space.
Don’t get me wrong, that time will come. But, I’ve (slowly) started to accept that it could happen at any time. This post was a great reminder to help me reframe this issue of wanting things to happen, well yesterday lol.
Greatness inevitably means coming up against a lot of failures and, what can feel like, slow progress. The one thing all of the greatest and most game changing people/products have had in common is, they kept going.
So will I.
And for anyone having a rough week, keep going too ✌🏾.
TIPS FOR FOUNDERS WHO STRUGGLE WITH PRESSURE: Comparison is the thief of joy. If you want to enjoy the destination as much as you enjoy the journey, please stop comparing your timeline, progress and outcomes to the people around you. Celebrate the wins (no matter how small) and fall in love with the process. The destination will come. 💡 Plans
Raise 2k for our charity event venue
In two months, we’ll be helping 50-60 children in foster care get access to free hair care.
And in the next four weeks, we need to find £2k to pay for the venue in full.
This is time sensitive and means I need to channel a tonne of energy into getting the right brands and people onboard as well as getting the press coverage we need to raise the events profile.
So, my focus will be:
Securing more radio and print interviews (mainly in local, London based stations)
Getting a couple of well known stylists and barbers involved so they can spread the word
Gaining some brand sponsors who will cover the majority of the costs
That means a tonne of outreach, calls and referrals from the people I know. But, in the grand scheme of things, this is just another skill that I can fine tune as a founder. And while I know that fundraising while we’re event planning is risky, that doesn’t make it impossible 😉.
I’ll keep you all posted on the progress!
MY ASK: I’d love to know what problems some of you are facing so I can answer them. Feel free to reply to this email, DM me or leave a comment with any topic suggestions that you have. 🤔 Questions?
Feel free to drop any questions in the comments below! Until next week,
J x
P.S. Here are some of my other posts:
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