693 Jessica Bargenquast:

Everyone has a different path to success in business … different talents, skills, experiences and differences in how we learn. My guest today – Jessica Bargenquast – learned what many great entrepreneurs learn over time: There is no cookie cutter way to repeat someone else’s success in the same way or with the same tactics. Each successful business relies on a founder willing to double down on their unique strengths and think outside the box on how to get there.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is dedicated to making it easy for women in business to help each other meaningfully – by buying from each other. You’ve heard me talk about why we all need to #liftasweclimb so it was a delight to meet Jessica Bargenquast, who found her own unique path to create Lady ChangeMakers, an all-inclusive e-commerce platform for women-owned businesses. Jessica is an expert in creating exposure and driving traffic for e-commerce businesses, and today we talk about her big vision and how she overcame her deep introversion to get the confidence to step into the light and grow her business.

There is a stereotype of an entrepreneur as a hard charging extroverted hustler – full of confidence and bravado. The reality is rather different, in fact many of the most successful entrepreneurs, even sales people, are deep introverts, many of whom, like me in fact, get good over time at communication skills that make us appear to be extroverted.

Jessica Bargenquast says deep down she’s always been quietly confident in what she could accomplish just by working hard. And being a hardcore introvert, she says she wanted to prove that she didn’t need anyone’s help to be successful.

By the time she hit her 30s, she realized that it is not enough to be a hard worker, you need to actually talk to and connect with people to succeed in business. She learned the power of investing in herself, first through coaching programs and masterminds, and just as quickly learned that to succeed, even with everything she was learning, she’d have to chart her own unique course.

Jessica says she learned that being shy was not her problem; it was actually about finding the confidence to speak and live her truth. She also learned there was a different path for women, that there is room for all of us to succeed in a big way, no matter the industry, so she decided after failing in her first business to try again and this time to help women to rise to the top – together.

With over 15 years of experience in marketing, advertising and promotions, Jessica launched Lady Changemakers to make it easy for women entrepreneurs to get their products discovered and buy from each other.   Its growing success has a lot to do with Jessica’s expertise in SEO, which she says can’t discriminate against you for being a woman. It only sees your keywords and content, so she’s using SEO to make women feel seen and heard in their businesses.

So, listen on and be sure to join the conversation with Jessica and me over on Podopolo, the gamechanging app for personalized and interactive podcasting. Just follow Wings of Inspired Business there, and join us in the comments section.

Now let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Jessica Bargenquast.

Melinda Wittstock:

Jessica, welcome to Wings.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Melinda Wittstock:

We share such a similar mission about women helping each other, because we are so much stronger when we’re together. And what was the inspiration really that led you to found Lady Change Makers?

Jessica Bargenquast:

I don’t know that it was ever one specific thing I think it was an accumulation of just kind of being eaten up and spit out by corporate. I come from a lot of male dominated industries like advertising and car dealerships and just very heavily male dominated, so I always felt a little singled out in the corporate world and just really frustrated. And so it’s been years in the making and I started my own agency a while back where I wanted to support women owned businesses and it actually ended up being a field business that I had, but I always knew I wanted to come back to supporting women somehow after that happened. And I found myself on Instagram all the time, as we all do saving all these businesses I wanted to support into those little folders that you can do on Instagram, but then I’d go out and then I would totally forget to go to that business that I knew I wanted to support.

So I kind of came up with this idea that there needed to be an easier way to find all these women owned businesses that are out there. So I created essentially a directory, an online directory for myself in the beginning. And it turns out that other women wanted this too, 83% of women want to support women owned businesses, but 62% don’t know where to find them. So I found out I wasn’t alone. So it kind, it just spiraled and grew word of mouth. We started with about 50 businesses in 2020, we’re at over 750 today.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so good that you’re putting the ‘you go girl’ into actual like action because I think a lot of people start out with that sentiment. Like I really want to buy I from other women owned businesses, but how much do we put that sentiment and words into action? And of course it’s so much easier to do it when you’re really busy in business yourself if there’s a directory right there for you, there’s really no excuse.

Jessica Bargenquast:

My intention behind it was to so you could go out and about in your local community and find a business, a women own business to support, and then a pandemic hit. So being local wasn’t as important as I initially thought, so we all had to move online in 2020, the pandemic actually sped up e-Commerce by five years so everyone had to move online. So it’s more important than ever that we can find each other online and because we’re all online, that means it’s been never been more crowded on the online space. So now we have this one central hub where we can find support and shop women owned.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how do you find all these businesses? Do they come to you or you’re always actively looking or getting referrals? How does it work?

Jessica Bargenquast:

A little bit of both. So we started with about 50 businesses that I reached out to creating their listings for them kind of snowballed from there into a lot of word of mouth. But my background is in marketing and advertising and our platform is a little different in that we specialize in SEO, so search engine optimization, which just means that we can be found in Google searches. So a lot of our traffic that we have coming to our platform is from our SEO efforts.

Melinda Wittstock:

How much does your platform really help female own businesses find their customers?

Jessica Bargenquast:

Yeah. So one of the biggest trends right now is because of everyone being online, a website and social media presence just isn’t enough anymore. It used to be enough and anyone could find anyone on Instagram, but it’s a lot harder now. So one of the biggest trends right now is joining, it’s called OPPs, other people’s platforms. So that’s what Lady Changemakers is. We’re just another platform for you to gain visibility online. And what’s unique about our platform, especially is that we work on our e-Commerce side, so if you have a storefront on Lady Changemakers, anything you can buy from your store is actually a link to your own website, which actually only builds SEO for your site. So we are kind of doing, it’s like a collaboration almost between two websites that we do, which makes us really different means that we don’t charge you all of these extra fees that Etsy and Amazon does because we’re just using your website links to help sell your products for you.

Melinda Wittstock:

A hundred percent. So what was it like? Did this all just come together pretty easily for you? It sounds like it was a process, it sounds easy, but I’m sure it wasn’t?

Jessica Bargenquast:

Yeah, I think always from a high level things look easy, but it definitely has not been an easy journey whatsoever. Like I said, I have a failed business from a few years ago and that was really hard for me to pick up the pieces, go back into corporate and then come up with another business so that alone, a lot of personal journey, personal journey had to take place where I really had to work on myself and I don’t know that I ever wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I always thought I would be a CEO of a company one day, but I didn’t know I would be my own company. So I had to really learn with my background of just being in marketing and advertising, all asked aspects of business. So I did things like join masterminds and I sought out consultants and coaches to help me get to where I am today.

Jessica Bargenquast:

So a ton of personal work that I can’t even begin to go into, but I’m a huge introvert. So I was very timid to even show my face on social media, let alone talk on social media. So I had to learn how to really be confident in myself and in my abilities to even begin to talk about my business. So it was really slow in the beginning because I just didn’t have that confidence. And it took like an entire year of me really pouring into myself to really grow my business. And I think that’s what’s really unique about women owned businesses that I’m really seeing because when I see male owned businesses, I don’t hear any of them talking about building their confidence or the personal work that they had to put in, but I see that a lot for women owned and I think it’s just because we’re more in tune to ourselves, so we’re really listening to what’s going on inside, which kind of reflects on what’s happening in our businesses as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. A hundred percent. It’s so interesting what you talk about being an introvert. I think even for extroverted women, ambiverted women, all sorts of women, there’s a big leap in stepping into the light, like really allowing ourselves to be visible and that men don’t really have that so much. So what was it that helped you get that confidence? That ability to even as a deep introvert to just put yourself out there?

Jessica Bargenquast:

So one of the biggest things that really helped me and I don’t know if you’re into the enneagram at all?

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, yes, yeah. Yeah, I know it.

Jessica Bargenquast:

I’m a huge fan. I am a five, which is the most introverted on the enneagram. So when I say I’m an introverted, I am 100% an introvert. So I actually hired an enneagram coach so that I could better understand how I work. So when I joined these masterminds and had these coaches, they were telling me to do certain things and it just never felt right for me and it’s because I’m wired very differently. So I had to really work with a coach to learn about myself, to learn how I could be confident in who I am, so I’m super nerdy and I love research, I love statistics and analytics and that’s not what most people like so I had to learn how to be confident and kind of putting a story together with this analytics and the research that I know and using my knowledge to create a story around it.

And I wasn’t confident enough to do that because I just thought people would think I’m a nerd, they don’t want to hear these things, but had to really learn how to do that storytelling portion, to be confident in giving that information out to people.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, you mentioned something that’s really interesting and it’s about self-awareness, figuring out what is intrinsic to you, what’s your zone of genius, and what’s not like who are the people that you need to hire because a business as it scales, it needs all sorts of types of people to do different things. But getting really close in touch with yourself and so you’re building a business around your core strengths, knowing what maybe you should be delegating or hiring and how best, I mean the other key part is how best you learn, how best you absorb information, how best you show up so you can be authentic, so you’re not trying to be somebody else in business that never really works.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Yeah. I couldn’t agree with that more enough. I always try to hire out people that I know things are not my strengths. In the beginning, I used to try to do everything myself and you just get burnt out doing that and it’s just going to take a lot longer so I would rather speed things up and get things done quicker by hiring somebody I know as an expert in that field. So when I launched the new portion of our platform where we can actually sell things from our storefronts now, it used to be just a directory and now it’s an entire e-Commerce platform. But I built the first version of our site myself and it took me a couple months to do that. But then on the second phase of my site, I hired those experts to do it for me. And then I hired a business consultant to look at my business model and help me readjust things there.

So I was not making money in my first two years of business because I had really terrible business model. And then once I adjusted that I was like, “Oh, okay, now I can actually make some money here.” So hiring those experts, yeah, it’s a big leap of faith when you do that because it’s a lot of money sometimes. But I mean, if you’re hiring experts and really looking into who you’re hiring, I couldn’t really research the people that you are hiring because I’ve made those mistakes as well. But when you really make those really great hires, they’re worth the money.

Melinda Wittstock:

One hundred percent. People who hire too late are more likely to fail in business. And I think so much of it is that we can so easily be afraid of hiring because it’s kind of like getting out over our skis, can we afford that person really? Like what happens if we don’t make our numbers? Like what if, can we make payroll? And as a result that fear defers the decision and because we’re looking at the team members as an expense rather than as an investment. But if they are an investment, which they are, what are the results you’re hiring them to, you’re not just hiring them to do something, but you’re hiring them to deliver a specific outcome and being very, very clear about that.

So I see that whole continuum in terms of women, not only being afraid to do it, to begin with, but also like having a gap in knowledge in terms of how to get the right people in the right place, delivering the right outcomes so that team helps you grow so much faster than you would if you’re trying to do it all by yourself.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And that’s always, the hard part is defining who that next hire should be as well. So are you trying to just take things off your plate or are you trying to find a position that’s actually going to generate revenue for your business?

Melinda Wittstock:

So talk to me about that with your platform and how has that grown and scaled like? I imagine it was just you on day one and so how has it grown and how have you handled that whole team growth issue?

Jessica Bargenquast:

Yeah. I mostly work with contractors right now, so I kind of hired a few key experts to handle certain projects for me so a lot of our stuff is project based right now where I have a PR team that helps me to get onto podcasts and they help me to get my name out there and our platform out there. And then I just strategically hired a business consultant who had the connections I needed to be able to hire website people, to maintain my website. So I have a website team that I work with that created our beautiful new platform that you can see today. They did such an amazing job on it.

And then also using vetting some SEO experts. I think that for me was since our platform focuses on SEO finding that really good SEO expert was really key for me to kind of put our money where our mouth is. We say we’re an SEO platform, so we need to show that. So that hire was actually my scariest hire, because it was just something that is my background, I know I can do it, but that’s not something I should be focusing on.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh yeah. That’s an interesting one, where you have all this expertise in it, but you cannot be the CEO if you’re still in all the doing and you got to let go.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Yep. Yep. So I could, one of the things I did was gave her a couple test projects and made sure did she do what I would do. And she actually gave me some suggestions in our projects and I was like, “Oh, okay, you know what you’re doing because you saw this opportunity that I even missed.” So then I knew I was making the right hire when I did that.

Melinda Wittstock:

SEO is your area of expertise and there are a lot of SEO experts out there. It can take time for SEO to really bear fruit and there’s a lot of ways you can make mistakes and Google, of course, their algorithm changes every now and again and whatnot. So what are the dos and don’ts?

Jessica Bargenquast:

Oh, well, if you’re not comfortable doing, I find a lot of people just don’t even want to bother with SEO and it is so important for your website. So half of your traffic should be coming from organic search results. And if it’s not, that means you need to adjust your content on your website. So just some easy things you can do is making sure that you are having a blog and maintaining a blog to whatever that means for you, whether it’s once a month, once a week, just make sure you’re putting content that is going to be adding value to the people that are visiting your site. So not just writing content to write it, but it has to actually be valuable content. And what’s interesting that you mentioned that Google, they do change their rhythm quite a bit, so it used to be, you needed to write a blog that was 1500 to 3000 words.

Now, if they’re really looking for content, that’s just valuable. Is the consumer going to come to your website, understand briefly what your article is about, and they’re going to grab all the keywords from there. And then a lot of times I find people just don’t want to mess with SEO and they just want to hire it out. And just a tip for people who are hiring anyone in SEO. If they’re going to tell you that they can get you to the top of Google search results, do not hire them, that is not going to happen for you. If you are just starting out on SEO, you are not going to get to the top of Google search results unless you are an extremely unique company that offers something that nobody else really does, which there’s a million people in all of our spaces these days. So it’s very unlikely that you’re going to get to the top of any Google search results.

Jessica Bargenquast:

And that’s really because all the big companies have been around for so long. They have all the SEO power, but you can still get it within a few pages of those Google search results by just maintaining a blog, making sure that all your pages are optimized. So using like a plugin, if you use WordPress, something like Yoast SEO, and just every time you do a page, it has a little form that you just fill out where you put your keywords. And I could talk about SEO all day, so let know if I get too boring.

Melinda Wittstock:

No, this is really important and it’s practical thing. I think it’s really interesting because a lot of agencies who say, yes, higher us and you’ll be at the top or whatever. My experience of SEO is it is a long term investment and it’s a continual investment and because it’s continually changing and you are developing more domain authority as you go and whatnot, but you’re right, it’s hard to play catch up to the big guys in that context. But I think what I’m hearing you say, it’s not be all and end all to be top of the fold on the first page of results that you can still be doing well. You can still be attracting a lot of traffic, even if you’re not at the top of the search rankings.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Exactly, yep. And what’s interesting is if you can get your website URL onto other people’s platforms, other people’s, maybe you’re doing a guest blog or something, that’s all going to work to your favor for your own website because Google sees that you’re appearing in more than one place. So like Linda, you’ve been on all of these big media companies and you’re on their pages and stuff so you’re going to get a lot of SEO traffic just from being on their websites. So making sure that you’re just getting your name out onto different places as well. So it’s something as easy as being seen on like a spot on a TV show or being a guest blog on something. So that’s another great way to gain some additional SEO power as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

And making sure there is valuable back links. So if you’re trying to increase your visibility, you’re going out there and getting earned media and all that stuff, make sure that they link back to you.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Exactly, yep.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so because I think there’s a lot of things that we forget to do, say you go on a podcast and we automatically make sure all the guests have links and all that good stuff, because our mission is to promote women owned businesses just like yours through this podcast. So we do it, but then there’s a lot of podcast hosts that don’t necessarily know anything about SEO or just don’t do that so you just have to not be shy to ask I guess.

Jessica Bargenquast:

That is a great point and I should be doing that as well, so thank you for that reminder,

Melinda Wittstock:

So where do you see this going? I mean, you’ve got all these great e-Commerce brands, you’ve got women buying from women, what are some of the sort of metrics you look at for your success and where are you headed? Where do you think you’ll be five years from now?

Jessica Bargenquast:

Now, I am not short on ideas, I am a very big visionary kind of mind. So every time I think I come up with a big idea, the next month I come up with an even bigger idea. So when I-

Melinda Wittstock:

I got the same issue. Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Right. So, when I first started Lady Changemakers, I was like, okay, we’re going to become the Yelp for women. And for me, that was a big idea. And then I accomplished it and I was like, okay, what’s the next steps? How can we make Lady Changemakers even bigger? So then I said, okay, we’re going to move from the Yelp for women to the Amazon for women. So women can actually sell from our marketplace. So now we’ve accomplished that. We’re actually in some development for some software that we’re going to be creating, so we’re going to have actually something that’s proprietary for Lady Changemakers that’s going to be creating this frictionless buying experience. And that’s about it as much as I can say on that without getting too nerdy.

Melinda Wittstock:

It sort of sounds like it’s a web3 or something?

Jessica Bargenquast:

I have not gotten into web three as much as I want to, but I am also exploring options in that space as well as stuff like NFTs. And then if you pay attention to stuff that China is doing, so they have something called a super app there. And I had a big idea the other week in thinking, what if Lady Changemakers could be a super app for women owned businesses, meaning you can not only be purchase from them, but everything that you can think of that could be women owned is just put into Lady Changemakers. So you can make reservations to a women owned restaurant, you could make … Trying to think of the other options, but the [crosstalk 00:22:25].

Melinda Wittstock:

Get your hair cut.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Yeah. Get your hair. Book your appointments too, the [inaudible 00:22:30] salon. You can do all of that straight from our platform.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. Because I could imagine not only the women businesses that have physical product that they’re selling e-Commerce, but then you’ve got a whole bunch of businesses use a whole bunch of coaching businesses. Then you have businesses like mine, which is an interactive podcast network and app, there’s a women on business, but it doesn’t fit completely into the e-Commerce space, say.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Yeah. And we started to incorporate that when we launched our new platform because I did notice there was this hole in the space where Amazon and Etsy sell products and products only. But I found that women have 80% and of the purchasing power, we make all the decisions when buying, so I know that they’re buying services as well so why can’t we sell services on our platform as well? So we actually have a lot of service based businesses on our new platform like coaches and we actually have a salon on our storefronts as well, so that we don’t just have products, which is really exciting.

Melinda Wittstock:

So what have been some of the biggest challenges, Jessica, that you’ve encountered along the way where, like all entrepreneurs, we all have these heart stopping moments, like things come out of left field or things we can’t control or something we didn’t know, or I don’t know, whatever. What have been some of your biggest challenges?

Jessica Bargenquast:

Gosh, I’ve had so many. A Lot of my-

Melinda Wittstock:

I know, right. I know every time I ask this question of anyone and I think, well, that’s like a stupid question because we’ve all had like so many challenges. I know from my own entrepreneurial journey for sure, but I always like to demystify them, destigmatize them.

Jessica Bargenquast:

I think a lot of mine too stem from me getting in my own way and just trying to grow a business and not actually understanding how I work best so I actually was late diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger’s and I was joining on these masterminds and just kept telling the people leading them, points not working this way. Like this is not helping me, I don’t know what it is. I see it works for you, but it doesn’t work for me. And turns out my brain is literally wired differently than most people’s and so learning that information really empowered me to kind of understand how I make decisions and how I best work, so I really had to make so many adjustments from learning from that because I was making so many mistakes. I was just doing things that didn’t work for me.

So when I first started, I kind of followed the MailChimp model, which is get people in for free and then upsell them later. And I was not making money that way. And that was going on for about two years and then it just never felt right but I was trying to grow this community and I love supporting the businesses that come into my directory, but it turned out we were on the same level. And so I was just starting, they were just starting, they didn’t have a budget. So I was targeting the complete wrong customer, even though I wanted to help them.

So, our directory is completely free to join. Our marketplace is a one-time fee to enter. So when launching the marketplace, I targeted a totally different consumer and I redid my entire business model. So there is this free option where you can join our directory, but if you want the additional exposure, if you want to sell directly from our site, it’s just a one-time fee to enter into that marketplace. And when I made that switch, everything started clicking. So really looking into your business model and is it working for you? And I didn’t make that discovery until I started working with a business consultant and when I really started understanding how I work.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that. I mean, one of the joys of entrepreneurship is you can create a business around yourself and your business should really leverage your best strengths. So that makes so much sense. I do think like masterminds as helpful as they are, there are a lot of cookie cutter approaches, like do it, or even coaches, do it like this because they’ve proven it. It Worked for them that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work for you, right? There are probably some common things that you’ve got to get right, but not always everybody has their own path. So that’s such an important point.

And I think it’s really interesting about business models too, because when we talk about say software development, it’s a very agile process, it’s very iterative, you build your kind of minimum viable product, you’re testing it, you’re constantly co-creating with customers and consumers. You’re tweaking things like your work is never done because it’s an iterative process. So too, with a business model, so too with your marketing strategy, like SEO as well. All these different things. And so it’s like being open minded and being willing to learn. Like if something’s not working, don’t take it personally, it’s an opportunity to just try it in a different way.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Definitely. And I think that’s something I have gotten really good at in the past year and was not so good at in the beginning, so that was definitely something I had to learn was I’m just one of those people that has to know everything before I can really get going on something because I like to understand something from the beginning to the end because I want to know that I can create this thing. So if I create what are the steps I need to do, when really I just needed to let go hire the expert to do it. They can tell me the steps that they took to do it after they create it and then I can understand it and be happy with it. So yeah, just don’t hold yourself back there because-

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, on this podcast, we always come to the same conclusion that business growth and personal growth are the same thing or they’re interdependent.

Jessica Bargenquast:

They really are.

Melinda Wittstock:

In growing a business, you in inadvertently have to grow personally to be able to keep growing business and you’ve got to be on a personal growth awareness trajectory to be able to grow a bit. I mean, they’re both so intertwined. It’s so cool. So tell me about the best way, I have a lot of folks who listen to this podcast who run businesses, they’re female owned businesses, if they’re not on your platform yet what’s the best way to find it and what’s the process and how do they get on it?

Jessica Bargenquast:

Our website is ladychangemakers.com and you can enter through the directory right from our website. And if you want to join the marketplace, you’ve got a vendor section right there too, where you can learn more about it. And on Instagram, we’re at Lady Changemakers. That’s where I give all of my tips and tricks, lots of SEO. I love to give trends and research that’s going on to help you grow your business. So, I give a lot of information out on my Instagram and TikTok and that’s at Lady Changemakers. And for anyone who just wants to shop the platform too, just head to ladychangemakers.com.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, one thing, one idea for you and you probably already thought about it, but women who are running technology businesses are sort of like almost invisible and they’re not necessarily the face of the business because it’s a big tech technology company, but it sure would be great to get more support for women in tech.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Oh, I agree. I think Melinda Gates is doing this really cool initiative in Chicago where she’s just trying to create more women in tech and growing that support. It’s a dream of mine to be a part and collaborate with Melinda Gates one day.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ah, yeah. Sounds good. She’s got a good name.

Jessica Bargenquast:

She does.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so we know all the ways to find you and work with you, Jessica. Thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Jessica Bargenquast:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such a great time talking with you.