Brief situation overview.

First, to be absolutely clear: I’m not independently wealthy or in a position to play with stacks of Monopoly money — of my own money or others’ — to launch my beauty brand. This is just good foundational knowledge for you to have.

As background, in March, I left an organization that I’d been working with for a year and decided to take a hard reset. To avoid taking this story off-course, for the curious, some additional context can be read in the post here and follow up post here. When I left, I knew that it was time to build something of my own.

After leaving, I created two distinctly separate companies — 

The first company — “The Gain” — was the creation of my own consulting services business to allow me to put my experience as an Executive leader and my talent/experience/skills in brand strategy, organizational design, and marketing to work by helping small Purpose-led companies succeed. I love it. I’m helping good people and good companies make an impact and it’s been a good way to pay bills.

The second company — (“Habelo”) — has mostly been in stealth mode. It’s the beauty brand that I’m in the process of creating, and it’s the focus of this blog and story. But for the purposes of the “I’m not independently wealthy” start to this blog, it’s important to remember that like most founders, I’m hustling and working a lot (@ The Gain) to keep my life on track and bills paid while I’m also creating a start-up. 

Given the important work that I have been doing with The Gain, the variety of planning and development required for Habelo, and my other priorities in life (family and friends!), focus has been critical. In fact, the ability to define, create, and maintain focus is a skill that I’ve needed and have sharpened throughout my career.

Urgent vs. Important. I learned the concept of “The Urgent vs. The Important” from great leaders while I worked at CVS Health. I’ve later learned (today/this morning), that it’s called the Eisenhower Principle. The background and basic definition according to MindTools website:

“In a 1954 speech to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was quoting Dr J. Roscoe Miller, president of Northwestern University, said: “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This “Eisenhower Principle” is said to be how he organized his workload and priorities.”

The site describes the principle better than I can otherwise try to define it:

• “Important activities have an outcome that leads to us achieving our goals, whether these are professional or personal.
• Urgent activities demand immediate attention, and are usually associated with achieving someone else’s goals. They are often the ones we concentrate on and they demand attention because the consequences of not dealing with them are immediate.”

What that means for me…

There’s a lot do on this journey, but I’m disciplined about discriminating what is actually Important — in life and with Habelo — so that I can get to a successful launch and balance everything else (with my sanity intact).

Important focus for Habelo right now:

1. Create amazing product (incredible efficacy and experience) that nails it — solves the problem it’s designed for and absolutely exceeds expectations — for my customer; and
2. Raise capital, responsibly, so that I get to launch AND launch the brand well. 

Related to both of those focuses, I’ll tell you about my trip to the “Grand Brands Show” in New York this week, hosted by Consensus Advisors and my friend, Tara Foley.

More to come…

Cheers, Whitney