The Vicki Kotris Podcast

Episode 54: Unlocking Opportunities: The Power of Asking "What If" When Building a Business

• Vicki Kotris

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Ever wondered how a simple question could change the course of your career or business? Discover the immense power of just asking for what you want, inspired by Sarah Blakely’s journey with Spanx. Join me, Vicki Kotris, as I share captivating stories and real-life examples of how taking initiative and challenging assumptions can open doors you never even knew existed. From negotiating subscription fees to launching a successful food truck business, this episode is filled with actionable insights and strategies to help you rewrite your own narrative.

Embrace the "what if" mindset and see rejection not as a dead-end but as a pathway to new opportunities. Learn how focusing on potential and selling the dream can unlock creativity, innovation, and expansive growth in your entrepreneurial journey. This conversation is designed to fuel your ambitions with positive energy and a hopeful outlook, whether you’re a business owner, a creative soul, or someone simply looking to add more sparkle to your day. Get ready to be inspired and empowered to take bold steps toward achieving unexpected outcomes!

Thank you again for tuning into another episode of the Vicki Kotris Podcast! I want to support you, cheer you on a HYPE you up!! If you're celebrating anything (and I mean ANYTHING), send me a DM and let me highlight you on a recent episode.

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Vicki Kotris podcast. I am your host, none other than Vicki Kotris. I'm a retired corporate girly, two-time six-figure founder who's obsessed with brand building, sales generating and digital marketing. My mission with this podcast is to share the lessons I've learned, to help you make more magic and money with your own marketing efforts, and to feel inspired to continue on your own journey as a creator and entrepreneur. Here I'll share real life strategies, marketing tips and mindset shifts that have helped me go from cubicle to creator. This podcast is for business owners, creatives or those just looking for a little more sparkle in their day, so let's kick off this week's episode.

Speaker 2:

Hello and thank you for tuning in to another episode. I think that I am going to lovingly reframe these conversations or these episodes and just call them telesodes, since I'm driving in my Telluride and I am currently stuck in rush hour traffic, so I was just thinking about something that I wanted to get recorded because I think that it is such a powerful. It is such a powerful principle in business and marketing that is so often overlooked and overcomplicated and over explained and there's a lot of fear that goes into it, and so what I inspired me, what inspired me for this podcast, is that I have seen this clip of Sarah Blakely. If you've listened to the podcast before, you know that I am a Blakely head. She was the CEO of Spanx. She ended up selling it to BlackRock. She just launched a new business called Sneaks, which are heels on sneakers, and I still don't know how I feel about them, but she is a billionaire. She is so inspirational. She talks a lot about building a business and using energy and manifestation and all of these things that I believe really strongly in and building our business, which is a feminine-based business, something that is often forgot in this kind of male-dominated thinking or in just our economy and she was interviewed once and she said that she got Spanx into Neiman Marcus, like when it was very early on and if you don't know her story, she founded Spanx and I believe it was the next year she got on Oprah's favorite things list, the one that everyone buys over Christmas.

Speaker 2:

I mean that is huge. Like that is a guaranteed sellout strategy and being selected for that, or even being on a radar for something like that, I mean that can change lives. That can change the whole trajectory of your business. So she was talking about how she got into Neiman Marcus and someone asked her like oh my gosh, how did you get into Neiman Marcus? They are so selective, like their buyers are famously known for not taking meetings with new founders or with new products. Like they are a very traditional, rooted brand and that's just the way that it's always been and she goes. You know what I told them just the way that it's always been and she goes. You know what I told them. You know what I told them those people who asked about how I talked to the buyers she said I just asked. I just asked them what it would take to get Spanx on the shelves, how many units I needed to sell to make an impact, and when they were available, for me, to drop off my samples. That is it. That is so simple, and I see this happen all the time.

Speaker 2:

I am the biggest advocate to. Everything in life is negotiable, and I have negotiated everything from serious radio to medical bills, to phone plans, to anything that you can imagine. I have negotiated own plans to anything that you can imagine I have negotiated, and the reason being is because so many things are changing so quickly, especially in larger organizations, that they don't even from the top down, like they don't even know what they're charging. It's just like a little increase here and you don't pay attention, and then we're just paying automatically, like we are on autopilot. We're not paying attention to these things, and so I find it really powerful that when you ask the question, you might assume the answer is no, but it's not always, and that possibility of not always is enough to get me going. That's enough to inspire me to a new outcome, redirect my path, get my juices flowing for something new and ready to receive something that I didn't even know existed before I asked the question, and that's exactly what Sarah did.

Speaker 2:

She didn't know. I mean even Marcus could have told her to go shove it and said take this to Kmart, lady, our buyers are not going to buy underwear with the feet cut out, are you stupid? But instead she said this is my product. I think it's pretty cool, think your buyers would like it? Sure, yeah, let's give it one skew, one shelf a couple months. See how it does Sell out. I mean, that's how she became a billionaire. She just asked if there was any opportunity to promote or sell her product.

Speaker 2:

I mean I pay $5 a month for Sirius Radio and I renegotiate it every six months until I notice that my credit card bill it goes back to $30 a month because I didn't ask, because I let it lapse. But you know what? I go through my rounds, I have my conversations, I ask if they'll give me that beginner rate again and I'm going to tell you what they have never said no, I spend time. So when we're not paying with our checkbooks, we are paying with our time, and that is a big delineation. I will spend the time to pay a little bit less. It's not every situation, but I do with those kinds of things because it matters to me. Subscriptions matter to me. They compound over time. You don't realize how much you spend and that's why I make those changes.

Speaker 2:

But I ask and the same thing goes with in business when I started my first business, which is a food truck and catering company and you know I had never had a business before, I never really worked in a small business before, especially like food and beverage I worked in a bar. That was my only experience. So if you were to ask me then, vicki, how are you going to get people interested in your company? How are they going to even find out about you? I did what I knew how. I just went back to basics. I thought, well, I did what I knew how. I just went back to basics. I thought, well, samples work and you know what else works really good Things that are a little taboo.

Speaker 2:

And at the time I had a friend of a friend who owned a really popular brewery in Cleveland and they were known for having a really funky take on microbrewing. They had so many different fun flavors and they were winning awards. They were growing really fast, just such a fun, fresh take on the sometimes snobby microbrewing. And I showed up there one day and I said I brought a bunch of samples, like here's all of our cookie dough and ice cream treats and I just wanted you to try them. And he's like cool, okay. So I mean, what do you think Like, what do you need? I said I have this idea and I think it would be really fun to do a cookie dough and beer pairing. He was like yes, yes, yes, of course let's do that.

Speaker 2:

And I thought it was so funny because I have told many people about this over the years and like that is so weird, like that makes no sense at all. We don't understand, we do not get it. This isn't milk and cookies, this is beer and cookie dough. And help this make sense. And I couldn't, I had no reason.

Speaker 2:

And the funniest thing is that when we launched the tickets for this event, the one thing I knew how to do was to sing something from the rooftops, was to tell everyone that I knew, was to promote it on social media, was to make really fun graphics, was to just make it fun, you know, infuse that energy into it. And so we launch our tickets. They sell out in an hour. They call back and say the brewery calls back and says do you guys want to add another slot that sells out in an hour. Do you want to add a third slot that sells out in an hour? I actually do think that one took like a day to sell out, but the point is that we did this every other month for 18 months. Anytime there was a fun holiday Valentine's Day or Halloween or any Christmas we found every microbrewery in that area and a few wine bars and we did the exact same thing.

Speaker 2:

And then you know what happened is we started a buzz for ourselves and people still seven years later come up to us and say we, we tried your cookie dough for the first time at platform brew and it was so awesome, that was so fun. Like we wish that. We wish you could do that again. You know, like what a fun memory we had.

Speaker 2:

And I came up with something that was so silly and otherwise dumb and I just asked hey, would you be willing to do this? Would you partner with us on this? It could be really stupid and it could blow up in our faces, but who cares, it could be really fun, it could be really cool. And the latter is what happened. So I'm such a big proponent of whatever fear or embarrassment that just intertwine themselves in the fear of hearing no or receiving some kind of objection, is to change the lens through which we look. Which is what if the opposite were true? What if, instead of the no, we hear the yes? It creates this amazing redirection into something wonderful and new and expansive and full of new positive energy wonderful and new and expansive and full of new positive energy. I really really love that outcome a lot more.

Speaker 2:

I don't know about you, but that feels a lot more warm and gushy to me, and when I'm building a business, I'm about the possibility. I'm selling the dream. I'm not talking about what is. I'm asking what if, and that is something that keeps me going. I hope that helps you today. I hope that it inspires you to ask what if? Ask the question, take one step forward, try something new today and I will see you back next week.