713 Amy Errett:

Women founders of companies with the potential to scale to $1bn or more still only get less than 2% of pool of Venture Capital money – a number that hasn’t moved in more than 2 decades.  As a serial entrepreneur who has raised investment capital before and in the process of raising and closing a round right now, I know how hard it is. And like my guest Amy Errett, who has raised some $200 million as the founder and CEO of the fast scaling Madison Reed, shares today in this special interview, video streamed from the stage by Podopolo during the BottleRock Music Festival, there is a lot of unconscious bias out there, even from female investors. So we dig deep into how to get women founders funded – and Amy’s own journey founding and scaling the beauty company that is changing the way women color their hair.

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.

Like my interview with NFT expert and multipreneur Lee Richter last week, this interview may sound a lot different than the last 712 episodes. Normally I record all my interviews on Zoom – so, what a pleasure to be live, face to face with my guest Amy Errett of Madison Reed, on a beautiful stage in sunny and I admit, wine-soaked Napa, at the beautiful Feast It Forward, the perfect playground to connect podcasters with influencers, celebrities, rock stars, entrepreneurs, and fans. During Memorial Day weekend, my podcasting platform Podopolo put dozens of inspiring podcasters in our network on stage at Feast, leveraging our interactive live video streaming technology for real time interaction. You can catch all the interactive video streams – including this one – on the Podopolo app.

And it’s worth it because live interactive podcasting brings a whole new dimension to the craft.

If you don’t know Amy Errett, she is the wildly successful founder and CEO of the hair color company Madison Reed, the fast-scaling startup that’s created a luxurious hair color formula with ingredients you can feel good about. Madison Reed uses proprietary color-matching technology and a team of professional, on-call colorists to help women choose the perfect shade of hair color, which is delivered to their door for under $25. For women who prefer to have Madison Reed color applied with the help of a licensed professional colorist, Madison Reed Color Bars are open nationwide with over 50 Hair Color Bars in major US cities and growing. Amy is also an investor and partner at True Ventures, which has backed Madison Reed along with other top tier Silicon Valley VC firms Norwest Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures and Portfolia.

Amy was featured in Forbes 50 over 50 last year, and has raised almost $200 million for Madison Reed, now on track to hit the $1bn revenue mark and beyond.

Today Amy share’s her journey and what it takes for women to succeed as entrepreneurs of highly scalable billion dollar businesses – she says at the end of the day it’s a mix of resilience and gratitude.

And by the way, if you’re a podcaster, you can also enter to win the chance to be featured live on stage with a whole VIP experience in Napa built around it. Check it out.

Now to Amy Errett, the founder of fast-scaling hair color company Madison Reed.

Amy was recently featured in Fast Company and Lesbians Who Tech & Allies Queer Inclusive Badass in its third annual FCQueer50 List. In 2015 and 2018, Amy was named one of the “Bay Area’s Most Influential Women in Business” by the San Francisco Business Times. She was also a finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of The Year® 2018 Award in the Northern California region, which she won in 2006 for the consumer category.

Amy’s multifaceted career has ranged from founding and operating companies, to investing in startups, to volunteer nonprofit leadership. Currently, Amy is Founder and CEO of Madison Reed, an omnichannel beauty brand that is challenging industry titans in the hair color space. She is also a Partner at True Ventures, focusing on investments in consumer and ecommerce startups.

Prior to founding Madison Reed, Amy was a General Partner responsible for the Bay Area office of Maveron, a leading venture capital firm focused on the consumer sector. Before Maveron, Amy was CEO of Olivia, where she repositioned the travel business as a complete lifestyle company.

Amy also served on the senior management team at E*TRADE where she diversified the company beyond its brokerage offerings and ran a $200 million business. This followed 10 years as Founder and CEO of The Spectrem Group, a worldwide strategic consulting firm. Amy sold Spectrem to NFO, an IPG subsidiary.

Amy believes in the power of giving back and dedicates herself to supporting humanitarian organizations. Amy is a member of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast chapter of YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization), and serves on the boards of the University of Connecticut Foundation, Common Sense Media, Glide, and Madison Reed.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Amy Errett, from the stage in Napa’s Feast It Forward where Podopolo put podcasters live on stage during BottleRock – including yours truly.  Be sure to download Podopolo to check out the interactive video version of this interview, plus all the incredible BottleRock content, all the interactive video and much more, and follow Wings there too so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Welcome, everybody, this is Wings of Inspired Business live from Napa at Feast It Forward, where Podopolo is putting all these amazing podcasts on stage and connecting people with incredible interviewees. And I am very privileged this morning, with my crackly voice, to be able to interview Amy Errett, who is the CEO and founder of Madison Reed, the hair color company that’s just having massive explosive growth. So first of all, to you, Amy, congratulations.

Amy Errett:

Thank you, and thank you for having me, I’m excited.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, it’s great to talk to you because there aren’t a lot of role models of women entrepreneurs who build big businesses, who just go for it, swing for the fences. You’re exploding in growth. This is a billion dollar plus business that you’re building, right?

Amy Errett:

At least.

Melinda Wittstock:

At least. Exactly. See, I love that.

Amy Errett:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

What holds women back from seeing that? What’s stopping so many women from being in that billion dollar league?

Amy Errett:

I think it’s a combination of things. First, I think most women or most girls get taught they’re not supposed to be good at business or math or science, and it starts early, so that’s part of the DNA. And then I think the second thing is that most women are having a harder time getting funded. So in order to build businesses like this, you do need, primarily, venture capital backing. And that becomes harder… And we were just chatting about this before we went live, what even is harder is if you’re running a business where the target of your audience is women, most investors discount that. They don’t understand. They’re going to invest in things. Most investors are men and they’re going to invest in things that they understand. And certainly, I can tell you, when I started pitching the business about hair color, the number one comment I got was the market wasn’t big enough. And I’m like, “Are you nuts?” So I think-

Melinda Wittstock:

The majority of the population?

Amy Errett:

Yeah, I think that part of it is the wiring of women. I think part of it is the investor community. And my motto is that green is a universal color. And so as soon as there’s women’s businesses that have huge outcomes, some of this will change.

Melinda Wittstock:

I believe that’s true. It’s interesting, I’ve been in so many pitches over the years as a serial entrepreneur with the exact same thing, just not understanding the market or assuming that it’s small, and finding myself saying things like, “Well, I’m not asking you to be the customer, this is a business opportunity,” and, “We’ve done all this work and this is how it’s going to grow,” and whatnot, but it’s very, very difficult. Is it just that, that they don’t understand the markets that a lot of women address, or is it something else? And what can we do about that?

Amy Errett:

Yeah, so my basic belief is that most investors, if they’re guys, don’t wake up every morning saying, “I don’t want to give women money.” I don’t think it’s conscious.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Amy Errett:

I think it’s unconscious. And so I think there’s an unconscious bias that you tend to invest in things that you understand. And then there’s the other side of it is, a lot of women come in and maybe need more help in pitches, need to exert a certain amount of confidence in pitches. And so, I’m also still a venture capitalist and I spend a lot of time mentoring young women, trying to explain to them that there is a formula to get funded. And some of it is presentations that are very clear. There’s kind of a deck format, there’s something that you do. I know the firm that I’m a partner at, True Ventures, we are spending a lot of time focusing on diverse groups and investing across the board in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and also really looking for our own gender bias.

Because here’s the other thing, as a venture capitalist, sometimes I had gender bias, which is bizarre. But it’s absolutely true that we all carry those unconscious biases with us and they just perpetuate, so I think we just need to break the cycle. And it’s exciting, I teach at Stanford in the graduate school and there’s so many smart, amazing women who come up to me and they have great ideas. And so we just have to get behind this. And as I said, as when women have big outcomes and they become venture capitalists, that’s when the cycle shifts.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes, 100%. I remember setting a goal for myself, because a mission close to my heart is with exit money, that women reinvest in other women. Because this has been happening for forever with guys, there’s no thing around it, but getting women to really be investors is a big deal.

Amy Errett:

Absolutely. There are a couple of investors in Madison Reed, there’s a group called Portfolia, and it’s only angel women.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, Trish Costello.

Amy Errett:

Yes, Trish.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Amy Errett:

They are big investors in Madison Reed.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, yeah.

Amy Errett:

They’ve been great. We actually let them into the last two rounds because I really want to also have the women that believe in the company reap the benefits of the growth.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. That’s amazing. It’s a give forward.

Amy Errett:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Not just a give back, a give forward.

Amy Errett:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

I want to talk to you about how you go against the naysayers. So here, the pandemic is raging, and you had retail locations, they had to close. You had to do a big pivot, like every other business in the United States and all around the world. You managed that. I want to get into how you did all of that and how quickly you’re able to pivot, but, first, what I’m so interested in, the pandemic’s still going on and you say, “We need to get back into retail,” and you have a whole bunch of, “No, that’s crazy,” but you do it anyway. Talk to me about that because a lot of people give in to the, no, that’s crazy, you shouldn’t do that. And they listen, but you didn’t.

Amy Errett:

So the first thing that I’ll say is being a founder is crazy.

Melinda Wittstock:

I know that.

Amy Errett:

So you have to be crazy to want to do these things. They’re highly risky, there’s very small probability that it works. So what I try to explain to people all the time is that most people know in their gut what’s right. And then the question is, will you allow the forces around you to try to convince you of what you may know is right? So in our case, we have a great product that we make ourselves with the best ingredients there are for hair color. We knew that 50% of women go to a salon; we knew 50% do it at home. We had a very large business before the pandemic. We had started to open stores, we had 12. We closed all of them in March of 2020. Today, we have 65.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing.

Amy Errett:

So we’ve opened all of those stores, and here’s why. I knew, emotionally, that no matter what happened… And I used to say, “In a hurricane, in an earthquake, she’s going to still color her hair.” Well, now I can add, in a pandemic, she’s still going to color her hair. And what I knew is, as soon as people felt somewhat comfortable, women, they were going to get out.

I didn’t believe that we would turn everybody to an at-home user. I knew that we needed to hit demand. And in fact, what’s happened for us is all the women that were using us at home, once we opened stores in their region, decided to just switch behavior if they chose to color that way. So for us, yeah, I had a lot of private equity firms who wanted to give us money in the summer of 2020 as we were exploding. And they kept saying, “Well, my partners just said, ‘If you just stop growing the stores,'” and I was like, “We don’t want your money,” because we knew this.

So now, if you fast forward and you look at most companies that are just online, they’re in trouble because, as you know, acquisition costs have gone crazy with Facebook iOS changes, with saturation in the market. There isn’t a consumer in the world that only buys something one way.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, amen, because that’s at the heart of Podopolo. And all of this is why we’re sitting here, that it’s not just on an app.

Amy Errett:

It’s experiences.

Melinda Wittstock:

That it’s experiences, and it’s connecting.

Amy Errett:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s connected experiences from digital, social, through to real life.

Amy Errett:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

And that’s such a common thread.

Amy Errett:

So at the end of the day, if you’re in a consumer business, the number one thing you need to do is understand your audience. And if you can understand your audience, who is she, and what is she going to do? Then that’s what you do with your business.

Amy Errett:

At every turn we’ve had a lot of doubters, we’ve had a lot of naysayers. There’s a lot of quotes that are out there of my list of the naysayers, which I have, by the way.

Melinda Wittstock:

Your list, is it long?

Amy Errett:

Which, when we ring the bell on the New York Stock Exchange, I will proudly text them all on a group text, “Hey, bottle of Dom on me.” So I think the issue is that we cannot be…

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Amy Errett:

If you believe in something, you put your head down and you execute. And it’s really about the journey, and so if you can bring people along with you. In our case, my mission is better ingredients. Really, the mission is that we employ colorists that typically make a very low salary in the US. Most stylists go to cosmetology school. They come out of cosmetology school $25,000 in debt, and most of them, not high-end salons, make $22 an hour. At Madison Reed, they make $45+, and we pay full benefits.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, so you’re really investing.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Amy Errett:

And so, really, these businesses are about some mission and purpose, and ours is that we’re going to put all these women back to work with great careers because I want us to be the best place for people to work. So we picked a funny industry that needed disruption with a huge market. There are lots of downs, not just ups. So that’s the other thing that people need to understand, that you run these things and it’s not all sunshine and roses, you deal every day with reality. And so I just feel very grateful for the opportunity to do this, and hopefully we’re making our customers lives better with a better product, and I believe that our team members are better for it.

Melinda Wittstock:

So in the earlier days, when you were just about to start that explosive, scalable growth… Because we all know with startups, there’s you, and there’s a couple people, and there’s a couple more people. You know what I mean? And everybody’s doing everything and whatever, and then, suddenly, okay, you’re exploding, you’re taking off. That’s a very dangerous time for a lot of startups, and so, what was the secret of getting that scaling piece right?

Amy Errett:

So we were in business, I think… I’m trying to remember what year it was. I think that we were in business about six years before the pandemic hit, so we had had what I would call some infrastructure pattern recognition. We had a lot of customers. As I said, we were already a good size business in Silicon Valley terms. But during the pandemic, what happened was… This is where a team really matters. We just all dug in on a level that was crazy.

So we make our hair color in Italy. We happen to make it in the Lombardy region of Italy, imagine that, the second hardest hit region next to Wuhan.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, gosh.

Amy Errett:

The only way we kept inventory was we made hand sanitizer for free for the Italian government. So we basically said, “We’ll make as much hand sanitizer as you want and we’ll pay for it, if you let our machines and our factory to remain open,” which they did. Then we had to get it to the US, then we had to distribute it. I was on the phone. We had a emergency response team at 6:00 in the morning for seven months, every day, seven days a week. And we had different people that were allocated to different problems that were going on. We call it now, the surge; that’s what it’s called in the company.

And one of the things that I learned really early in this was, groups of people dedicated to a mission could do anything.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%.

Amy Errett:

Anything. Our customer service team, we call them the color crew, extraordinary things. There were times we had 17 and 18,000 unanswered questions a day, and people just put in the hours, we closed the stores, we moved everybody from the stores to the call center because we knew we needed extra people and they needed jobs and we wanted to keep… We didn’t lay off anyone. And so I tell the story, the board was funny, our board, because I was having weekly calls with them and they kept saying, “Don’t let the wheels fall off the bus,” that’s one of the board members said. And I said, “Well, I can assure you the wheels aren’t off the bus, but every night in the garage we’re pumping up the tires that are really low.” The wheels aren’t off the bus, but they were flat pretty much every day.

Amy Errett:

So what it did do, though, was it’s now prepared us because we’ve grown on top of that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Amy Errett:

We got very lucky. We didn’t go backwards like a lot of companies that surged during the pandemic really had a hard time last year, we grew on top of that, we kept a lot of our base. And you talked about store growth, wholesale growth. We’re in Ulta, we’re in some Targets, so, for us, it built a certain kind of character. I’m a sports person, and so, for me, every great team has been a losing team at some point, so you have to learn how to take your knocks, and we did, and we have a mature team and we’ve seen a lot of things, so I think we’re much better for it.

The hardest part for us is, like anybody else, we have physical stores. So we’ve had people sick, we’ve not had anybody that sick, but when everyone’s talking now, they’re like, “Post-pandemic,” and I’m like, “I think we’re still in it, so I don’t think it’s post yet, but who am I to say?” So we just have learned to normalize an unusual situation.

Melinda Wittstock:

Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, any startup at any stage is always an unusual situation. It almost comes like you expected, there’s always going to be something. And certainly, I don’t know if this is true for you, but you get used to living a little bit outside your comfort zone and get comfortable with that, on that growth.

Melinda Wittstock:

So you mentioned sports, and you mentioned the context of failure and picking up, and the failure is a part of the entrepreneurial journey, and one that I think we all need to sort of learn how to psychologically accept that that’s going to happen. It’s what you take from it, how you can alchemize that into inspiration, into feedback, into learning. So talk to me about the first time you, as an entrepreneur, felt that you had failed, or your first acquaintance with that failure and how you transmuted that, if you will.

Amy Errett:

So I probably fail nine out of 10 times a day, just in terms of the fullness of what happens, and I always consider it my best friend.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Amy Errett:

The one characteristic that I always say I think defines a strong founder is resilience. It’s just the ability to say, “Oh, what happened here? What did I learn from it? How do I go forward?” And I think it’s all about gratitude. So I think if you can be resilient and be grateful at the same time… Because there’s no mistakes in life, they are just opportunities to figure out what didn’t work. When you’re a venture capitalist, it’s called pattern recognition. Like, “Oh, we saw that before, that didn’t go well, let’s not do that.”

Amy Errett:

And I think being in a founder situation, it’s the same thing. I mean, we fail all the time. We’re still in a place where we know our business model, but you turn cards over all the time and, as I say, “You actually, minimal viable product, fail fast.” Minimal viable product, fail fast. If you lose that mentality, you will be the hunted, as I call it. What’s happening now is we’re seeing companies who want to replicate our strategy. So all of a sudden, we were the disruptors; now, people are trying to disrupt us. So if we lose or get comfortable with winning…

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. It’s over at that point.

Amy Errett:

I’m obsessed with the Warriors, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Amy Errett:

And I’ve become more obsessed with the dubs this year, why? Anybody who knows the Warriors, what happened the last two years? They were atrocious, why? Because they had to rebuild the DNA, but the DNA always existed. So do you have the DNA to face into when you have a bad season and when you learned from that?

Amy Errett:

There will be nothing at Madison Reed that ever happens going forward that will be perfect. It is an imperfect situation, and I am thrilled to be in that imperfect situation.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that you mentioned this, because we joke on this podcast all the time that there should be an AA for perfectionists. Because so many women, I think we’re acculturated to be perfect from the time we’re in school and our notes look pretty, and we have to be pretty, and it’s how we look, and everybody’s drinks have to be filled, and we’re at the end of all of that. And when that gets extrapolated out into business, I think perfectionism is what holds women back, I think that’s a really big part of it. Do you agree with that?

Amy Errett:

I think it’s that, and I do think it’s that women are… We are the moms, the wives, the friends, the aging parents. And that’s not a put down from gender, but we tend to have these rules of being the glue.

Melinda Wittstock:

Mm-hmm.

Amy Errett:

So when you’re the glue, you actually think of yourself as low on the food chain.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Amy Errett:

And so when you’re low on the food chain, you never think about the fact like, “Oh, I’m worthy, I deserve that.” And if you look at the mantra of Madison Reed, our tagline is, confident is the new beautiful, and it’s really about confidence.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that.

Amy Errett:

What we’re trying to do is… It sounds ridiculous, and if there’s guys out there, you’re like, “What is she talking about now?” When your hair looks great, you feel unstoppable. You just do. That’s just one of the things. It’s a great equalizer in life.

Amy Errett:

So our metaphor is, great ingredients, lowest chemical profile, let us help you do your hair, and you can feel lights out, and then you go do it. You go get your life, be unstoppable; that’s our metaphor. If I got somebody… I have one person cheering, excellent.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s true.

Amy Errett:

When your hair-

Melinda Wittstock:

[Inaudible 00:19:31], Ladies.

Amy Errett:

All the women and their hair, some of the guys that don’t have hair here are showing me their lack-of-hair hair. It’s okay, no judgment, no judgment. This is usually when the guys that don’t have hair say, “Could you make a product for that?”

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Amy Errett:

But, thank you. But my point is that it’s just a metaphor. And what we’re trying to say to women, I just want the women out here to hear this, you are a badass, you rule the world, and our job is to make you feel like a badass, help you, and then once you do that, you’re just unstoppable. Go get it, life is yours. So that is really what’s underneath the mantra of the company.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that. I love that. And you said at the beginning of the interview that, really, the best companies have a mission. There has to be a North Star or a reason or a wire, an underlying reason that’s beyond just like, “Oh, let’s make money and flip this,” or, “Get it here,” or whatever, that transactional thing.

Melinda Wittstock:

You’ve talked a lot about the mission for Madison Reed, there’s a give forward or give back kind of element to it. What is it, like when you’re just in your core, in your deep… I don’t know if you meditate or whatever, but you have a vision of this and the impact that you want to have as a result of doing that. What’s that vision? What’s that North Star?

Amy Errett:

It’s a great question. Yes, I do meditate. I had to learn how to meditate because, with my personality, I would be like, “I’m not good at this,” and then that’s exactly the point.

Melinda Wittstock:

It took her one hour.

Amy Errett:

It took me a while to get there. The vision is that I actually believe that you can run a company that does great things and still make money, and it can treat team members really well.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes. 100%.

Amy Errett:

And that is the culture that we have. We have strong values, they are being stretched in so many ways right now. As you said, there’s four people, and eight people, then 50 people, then… Well, we have close to 600 people now. We will hire close to 800 more this year, so the growth is insane.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing.

Amy Errett:

But what gets stretched in that is the culture. More people, harder; it just is.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Amy Errett:

It just is, and so you need to figure out a way to have a cultural transference so that it’s not just the founder’s gig, that it’s everybody’s to believe that they’re responsible for…

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Amy Errett:

Culture is a soul, and it’s not just my soul, it’s the soul of the company. And so how do you instill in other people that that’s their values that they have to live and believe in? So it takes training, it takes lots of stuff around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. It takes guardrails when you run four wall store. It’s not just like Silicon Valley where people can come in whenever they want, they have to come in on time, they have to follow certain guardrails.

But I think the biggest thing for us that’s the difference is, this is a team and we are dedicated as a team with each other. The cultural values are strong. There’s lots of things that I do that are weird. I still interview every person before we make a offer that’s either an HQ or running a store or a district, why? Because I am not looking about whether you’re a great controller. I probably couldn’t assess that; the CFO can. I’m looking for whether you are additive to the fabric of this culture and we are additive to you. This only works if it works for the team member.

And most companies have it inverted, they’re like, “Well, it’s all about what the company wants.” Well, if the person doesn’t want that, or can’t fit, there’s no way in hell this is going to work. So I keep those cultural norms, I have lunch with the entire company every Wednesday, no matter where I am, there’s a lot of transparency in what we talk about. But no question that the hardest part for this company will be the transference of that unique culture as we grow. That’s the thing that I lay in bed at night and worry about a lot.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, as you scale, making sure that culture is sort of almost operational. Well, not…

Amy Errett:

Totally.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s an operational culture, right?

Amy Errett:

But it’s hard because it’s a thin line.

Melinda Wittstock:

It is.

Amy Errett:

When it starts to feel operationalized, people feel like it gets to be diluted, and so there’s this-

Melinda Wittstock:

Then it-

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, you’re working for the man at that point, right?

Amy Errett:

Yeah, or the woman.

Melinda Wittstock:

The woman.

Amy Errett:

Awesome boss lady.

Melinda Wittstock:

But these are really interesting challenges and I think, as we start to wrap up, how women approach the scaling challenge as opposed to men, and that culture, and also I see so many more women with businesses that have a social impact mission. Like, in our case, that’s at the root of everything we do with Podopolo.

Amy Errett:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s the only app where you actually make a social impact just by listening to the app, and donations and whatnot in your name just by doing it, so, already, we’re operationalizing that way ahead. We’re not waiting to give back, it’s just at the core. I see a lot of women doing that. Do you think women are going to completely change business?

Amy Errett:

I sure hope so. And again, we have a lot of men that work at Madison Reed and they’re awesome. And I am always really careful because I don’t, in my heart, believe that there’s just gender bias all the time.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Amy Errett:

I believe that it’s just, I’m out, I’m gay, I’m very proud of that, I don’t hide that from anyone. But as I say, the perspective that straight people had about gay people was not because gay people talked to each other and said, “Oh, I think we should be able to get married, do you?” And every gay person’s like, “Yes, of course!” We had to educate straight people.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Amy Errett:

And once we did that… And it’s the same thing in gender. Once women educate men, men are very open to… Men that have daughter, you want women to succeed. You want your partner to succeed. So I don’t believe there’s just this unwritten male gender bias, I think it’s education, and it only happens through talking about it, examples, illustrating it.

Amy Errett:

I have a really senior guy that works for us, really senior, and he’s been successful at other places where he was the CEO, and I see his transformation. Because what I do think women do is the way we lead is a little different. It is just a little different, and so I urge all the men out there to get…

Amy Errett:

I think successful businesses typically don’t run just from the head, they run from the heart, the head and the heart. And so I always try to tell people, “Access your heart. There’s a place for it in business,” because people, regardless of gender, they don’t want to follow a leader that it’s like, “Oh, you’re so smart.” A lot of smart people. They want to follow somebody who, oh, you’re smart and you actually see me. You actually care about me. And once you get that part, sky’s the limit.

Amy Errett:

So, congratulations, by the way, for what you’ve built.

Melinda Wittstock:

Thank you.

Amy Errett:

It’s awesome. People should listen. People should download the app, and that’s the way things are going to change by just being examples of those shining stars.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, Amy, you’re amazing and an inspiration to everybody. Thank you for all you’re doing in the world. And more importantly, who you’re being, because I can just see from you, you walk your talk. You are who you are, and that’s a really big part of the success of the company, I think, as well.

Amy Errett:

Thank you.

Melinda Wittstock:

So everybody, Madison Reed. Here, here, Madison Reed, everybody.

Amy Errett:

Woo!

Melinda Wittstock:

Go, Madison Reed!

Amy Errett:

All right. Thanks.

Melinda Wittstock:

Thank you, Amy Errett.

Amy Errett:

Thank you. Thanks a lot.