ENTREPRENEURSHIP CAN DEVELOP NATURALLY, OR BE THE MEANS TO SURVIVE. GREEN SMOOTHIES' CEO AND FOUNDER JEN HANSARD SAYS AFTER HER HUSBAND LOST HIS JOB AND THERE WAS NO HEALTH INSURANCE…SHE HAD TO GET SCRAPPY.
My kids were two and three. I started googling how to boost your immune system, what foods to eat to not get sick. I stumbled across a bunch of weird stuff, and one of them was green smoothies.
I didn’t have my first piece of kale until I was about 32 years old. The fact that my kids were happily drinking spinach and kale. It was like such a different win for me as a mom and we weren't getting sick. And so it started with friends… they started seeing me drink my green smoothies. That's when it became a business idea because I was like, oh, people want to know more about what I'm doing and I need money <laugh> so how can we make this go together.
IN AN EFFORT TO ATTRACT CUSTOMERS AND BUILD AN EMAIL LIST, THE CO-FOUNDERS HOSTED A FREE ON-LINE GREEN SMOOTHIE CHALLENGE.
We hosted our first free 30 day green smoothie challenge back in 2013 and had, I think 20 or 30,000 people sign up for it. Our hope was that if they gave us their email address to get this free challenge, we could tell them about a future product that we would create and sell it to them. You create something that's free, that has value that will eventually lead to the product that you want to sell them.
You put yourself out there in ways that might feel uncomfortable at first, but if you are doing it with the right intention to really serve others and you have something that's going to help them, then you should continue to share because you could change the world with what you have to offer.
THE BUSINESS REVIEW IS A PRODUCTION OF LIVINGSTON AND MCKAY AND THE HANKAMER SCHOOL OF BAYLOR UNIVERSITY.
