shark tank called…and i turned them down!
I turned down the opportunity to appear on Shark Tank to pitch the company I co-founded, and this made me a better entrepreneur.
It was 2016, and I was co-founder and COO of The Adulting School. We were not the first to use the word adulting, but it was a new, trendy word that was just catching on in funny memes. Our mission was to help Millennials fill the gap of missed knowledge around everyday life skills. Our vision was to help all emerging adults feel more empowered while changing the perception of an incapable generation by coming together as a collective to share knowledge. We were visionaries with only a small amount of business experience.
The Adulting School started by holding live events in Portland, Maine. We lured 20-something year olds to local breweries and bars for happy hour deals while experts within the community acted as “teachers,” instructing attendees on topics like budgeting their money, what kitchen food staples they should have in their pantry and how to use them, folding a fitted sheet, and how to sew a button.
I implemented every ounce of what I knew about SEO and created an online presence for The Adulting School that would convert into attendees for our live events. It worked so well that I got an email from a New York Magazine’s The Cut writer telling us she would be attending one of our events. It was the fifth event we had ever put on and this particular event was a new experiment to see if we could interest our target audience in a longer timeframe than happy hour and a slightly higher ticket cost. I’ll be honest - we had other, local media coming that I thought would be more beneficial for boosting attendance at our future events than someone from out of state. (That is a very Mainer mindset, we’re not altogether sure about an outtah statah.) I didn’t have a plan, yet, for promoting anything other than our events. That said, it was still cool that The Cut had noticed us. After the event ended the writer found us and we had the opportunity to chat. This was when I learned she had found us when she searched the word “adulting,” thanks to our SEO. (My mind was blown…OMG… this stuff works!) She published an article about our work with The Adulting School.
We. Went. VIRAL. The emotional response people felt about Millennials and why they didn’t know what they didn’t know, was so strong that the comments and engagement on every media platform drove more digital traffic our way. I’m a former teacher and my business partner at the time was a psychotherapist. Everyone wanted us to explain why adults don’t know how to adult! They wanted to know who to blame. It had to be someone’s fault, from schools to the parents to the lazy young adults. I would never have predicted it would happen so soon into launching our business, but a media tour kicked off. My business partner and I were thrown into interviews and appearances on every global media platform you can think of (and many you can’t), asking for our explanation. BBC, Now This, HBO’s Vice, The Doctors. Radio stations all over the world. The first TV interview I ever did for The Adulting School was on FOX, with Kennedy. The last thing I knew Kennedy was an MTV VJ (yep, I’m that old), but we had a message to get out to there and the world was open to hearing it. This was our opportunity to think bigger than events in Maine.
Within weeks, we pulled together a team to help us bring The Adulting School to an online platform so we could monetize and grow from the global media wave we were riding. We started developing what this superstar platform would look like - memberships to join as a student, teachers from around the world, a library of resources from videos to downloadable PDFs, social media, and gaming aspects to attract our target age group.
As things in our company grew at an exponential rate, it became evident that, just like our target audience, we were also adults who didn’t yet know what they didn’t know. There were elements of starting a company that my business partner and I hadn’t learned enough about or hadn’t had the opportunity to put into practice before.
Once presented with a global presence we expanded the possibilities of the company, but without a big vision offer in place from the beginning, our pivot wasn’t fast enough for the media surge.
We needed capital resources to obtain the human resources we needed for a speedy launch to take advantage of the flood of PR.
I began to feel like we might be sinking instead of moving forward…and that’s when a producer from Shark Tank called me, asking us to pitch The Adulting School.
I wanted to pitch our business and the new platform we were building. We needed capital.
What I didn’t want was to be the entertainment portion of the show, a segment they could promote to amp up their ratings from all the press we had. Also, my business partner and I didn’t want to give up such a large portion of equity quite yet.
So, I told the producer that I was honored they reached out and that if our business were in a different place I would have absolutely considered going on Shark Tank, but I would have to decline.
From that point on, I approached building the foundation of every company as if I were going to pitch it on Shark Tank...at any moment. For the past seven years, I sought out mentorship, earned certifications, and devoured information to fill my own gaps in business knowledge. I began planning for the impossible, continually proving the impossible was actually possible. I learned how to have conversations about equity and whether or not I wanted to be a major shareholder or whether selling equity was the better choice for the company. I buckled down on the systems, processes, strategies, and operations that would make all of this happen, and made myself visible as an expert in the entrepreneurial world.
I learned the most important lessons in business success by not being ready when Shark Tank called.
Fast forward 8 years, I’ve applied these lessons in the next businesses I started and with the clients I’ve worked with.
Let me introduce you to who I’ve become since then.
My name is Katie Zoe Brunelle, I’m an award-winning business growth strategist and communications specialist with almost a decade of experience in founding companies, marketing and operations projects, and executive leadership. I’ve worked with more than one Fortune 500 company. I’ve owned and operated a PR agency, and I’ve produced YouTube channels and TV shows. I won the Women’s Distinguished Business Award and a Lamplighter for communications campaigns in the healthcare industry. Learn more about me here.
I love helping entrepreneurs organize their businesses into a clear and completely custom roadmap that will compound every move they make, based on their individual talents and vision, increasing their success by 10x. Basically, I take your vision and give you the plan to put in place that I wish I’d had when Shark Tank called.
I’m the one who supports your growth while holding space for your life’s priorities. Stop spinning your wheels, embrace a plan that allows you to show up for yourself, and be empowered to run a business instead of letting it run you.
Want to work together?
You can book a 30 minute discovery call with me here.