Sevetri Wilson - Resilient

I often have to remind myself of why I started because I think that's important, too. As much as they try to tell you otherwise, business is personal. I think about how I spend my time, where my mind goes to, and where my thoughts lead me to so I can recenter when I need to, reinforcing what really matters.

As an entrepreneur you have to keep positivity in your life. If you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh, you know, this is going to be a dreadful day, or if it's Wednesday, and you're telling yourself it's the middle of the week and I just have to keep pushing to Friday until it's over, that mindset takes over your entire aura and embodies who you become.

Instead, you want to wake up and realize you have another day to get it right. Another day to get what is in front of you done. If you need to rest for a day or a week, then do it. What matters is that you're doing things that align with your whole self, right? You're doing things that make you feel good and you have to reaffirm yourself. That's so important because not everyone will. I had to learn over time how to live in a healthy state of mind. I'm a sponge when it comes to learning. I want to learn as much as possible, and in business you are constantly learning, but what are you absorbing? I listen to what people are dishing out and I soak up what I need and I release the rest. I have to, because we're in the age of over information.

Yet, in order for me to become a really good entrepreneur and business owner, I had to learn what I didn't know. When I first started out, I began to reach out to people who were in business who had ascended to greater heights, to where I wanted to go.

I think it's important to seek people out because they have insights that they're able to recall from their journey in a way that was exciting for me to listen to. It was exciting to understand what mistakes they had made so I could try to avoid some of them, although I'd make enough of my own. But I listened because the more you learn the more you can minimize the mistakes, and when you're building a business that's critical.

At the end of the day you have these people in your life as business mentors, or guides as I often call them, and you're trying to figure out how to win, how to play this game, how to be better than the next, and if you're in tech, probably faster than the next, too.

I grew up in a single-parent household. My mother raised four of us on a salary of $29,000 a year. She was an assistant manager at Kmart, running their gardening department. My mother worked hard for whomever she was working for and everything she did, she did with excellence. She passed that down to my siblings and me.

My mother was my role model, although she herself had not graduated from college. My grandmother had not received a formal education past the sixth grade but would live to be 103 years old. She was also my role model.

Do you know where your story begins? My entrepreneurship story began where my mother's story left off.

When I started SGI and then when I entered tech I was ready to work hard, but I knew I was behind. I knew that there was a knowledge curve that I had to really overcome. I wasn't out in Silicon Valley. I wasn't in New York. I wasn't in a hotbed for tech, and so I had to get really resourceful.

The biggest risk of all is not taking one.

—Mellody Hobson

My good friend Sherrell Dorsey, founder of TP Insights, referred to me as the “antithesis” in an article she published for her editorial and tech platform, The Plug .

I'm female, Black, from the South, and a nontechnical solo founder. In all respects (and perhaps statistics), I'm everything that they say a tech founder can't be.

Overall, I've now been an entrepreneur for over 12 years, and what a roller-coaster ride it has been, from bootstrapping my first company Solid Ground Innovations (SGI) to raising capital for my second company. It's been more than what I could have imagined, and really little of what I expected. But what could I have expected, being that I had no true blueprint starting out?

Yet, I feel that entrepreneurship was in my veins. Do you remember starting or selling anything, from Girl Scout cookies to lemonade stands? I never did either, but I did sell candy for my school's annual fundraiser. Looking back, that was a form of entrepreneurship mixed with hustle, too.

In this book, a lot of lessons are transferable to mostly all entrepreneurs regardless of sector, though I'll spend most of my time focused on walking you through the steps of launching and raising capital for Resilia, the tech company I launched in 2016. If you want a more detailed description of how I built Solid Ground Innovations, the professional services company I started in 2009, I have an entire self-published book on that. called Solid Ground. But let's start from the top of my entrepreneurship journey. When I was 19 years old, I rallied up my friends to help me start an online newspaper that I would name B-NOW ( Black News Our Way ). I remember talking to my college professor, Dr. Leonard Moore, about the idea. I told him that I wanted to bring together students from Southern University A&M College, a neighboring HBCU (historically Black college or university), and students from Louisiana State University A&M, a predominantly white institution, where I attended school. He was all onboard and asked me if I had filed an LLC. He might as well have been speaking a foreign language, because I had no worldly idea of what he was talking about other than it was something I perhaps needed to run a business. There in his office he wrote me a check for $150. Looking back, I guess I could say he was my very first investor. He was at least the very first person who believed in me and gave me money for an idea. He also understood that there would be costs associated with my idea.

It wasn't until a year or two ago that I acknowledged B-NOW as what in hindsight was my first business. My first hires were also students at LSU. Terry and Jonathan created my website. Another friend created my logo. I suspect it cost a few hundred bucks at the time: $50 for a logo, maybe $200 for the website with all pages included. I even enlisted my friends to write articles and to act as administrators, and hired my friend Scott to take our photos in the recreational room of the west campus apartments. I had an all-hands meeting on campus as well in Coates Hall, where I enlisted other friends to write stories for B-NOW .

Maybe I didn't know it then, but I had created something special. A few years later, at 22 years old, I would start Solid Ground Innovations.

But I was now in grad school. My mother had passed away. I was consulting while I worked at an organization called Louisiana CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) as an AmeriCorps VISTA member while going to grad school full-time. I know technically you weren't supposed to go to school during your AmeriCorps service, but it actually came very naturally to me.

At Louisiana CASA, I worked mostly on their advocacy programs and state capital projects. During this time an opportunity came about for me to start consulting for a new foundation, so I took it. This would eventually turn into an opportunity that led my work to receiving a Nobel Prize for public service, the Jefferson Award, and being recognized in the White House Report to the Senate on Volunteerism in America as the director of TTI, a nonprofit started by Tyrus Thomas, mostly running the organization, and an award-winning youth program we had created called C.A.T.C.H. (Caring and Actively Teaching Children Hope).

It was during these early days that I really learned how to operate an organization. So when I launched my first business to the public it felt right, even if I didn't feel 100% ready—though doing the actual work would prove we never ever really feel 100% ready. We just do it. We take the leap.