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Krystal Covington Show Notes Krystal Covington is CEO & Founder of Women of Denver, a social enterprise association that helps professional women develop their business skills, build confidence, and earn their worth as business leaders. The organization launched in 2014, and has hundreds of active members. Krystal has presented a TEDx Talk, contributes to Forbes, and has been featured in numerous media outlets, including the Denver Business Journal. Most passionate about Today, I’m most passionate about the membership organization that I lead that is called Women of Denver. When I started it, I called it, for quite a while, a passion project because I didn’t want to call it ‘work’. I moved to Denver, Colorado and was inspired to create a network for myself because I was lonely, I needed connections, and I wanted it to be the right kind of people. People that were passionate, career driven, open, and looking to create authentic and close relationships. It’s interesting because I’m shy and like to be on my own, but even people that like to be alone need connections. I was able to build that and pretty fast, I felt there was a need for that among other people and it started to get bigger and bigger until I turned it into a full fledged organization with membership dues, meetings, and a mission and we have been growing it since and lately we launched our magazine… The future is very bright and I see so much more, like the magazine and an app that we are going to launch. Who are the community’s members? The people that we attract to Women of Denver are women that want to make an impact, help others, and care about making a difference in the world and the community. Krystal’s best advice about approaching customers I think the most important thing is continue to keep your customers in the loop of everything you are doing, everything that you plan, and everything you ask them. Test out new things and don’t be afraid to fail. I failed a few times. Your customers can tell you what they want and you should pay attention to what they say and also what they do and how they act. When I started, I did a prelaunch. First, I asked people, and then I told them that I created what you said you want, are you with me? And I asked them to buy a full year membership to let me know that they were with me, and they did. I had a goal to how many people I need to sign in order to decide to open it up. And I keep asking before any new move or thing that I want to start or change, before I started to invest in that idea. Biggest failure with a customer I had a couple of failures that I can share. With Women of Denver in the very early days, I had an expectation that we need a lot of events right away, and we had 4-5 events in a month but we didn’t have a large number of members, so people got disappointed and didn’t get what they wanted out of the events, and the number of members was going down then, because it looked like we weren’t successful. So, I lowered the number of events, and people that came saw more people and the numbers of members started to grow. And it happened because I thought people wanted something they didn’t really want, and I didn’t understand. As soon as I figured it out, I was able to redirect. Earlier, I had an eBay business and I went bankrupt. It was the very early days of eBay; there was these popup stores, and I had a business for wigs, mainly for people that lost their hair because of cancer or disease, and also many other people, as well as celebs, bought the wigs and were very happy with them. I bought the wigs in China and had pretty good margins, but I didn’t realize that things were changing and that prices were going down and people started to buy directly from China. We had to sell the wigs in a loss, my business crashed, and we went bankrupt. Biggest success due to the right customer approach I think that the moment I realized that I’m doing something...