"I strongly believe entrepreneurs are made."
Meet Jess Lemon. A father, husband, engineer, and entrepreneur. Day job as a Reliability Engineer for a manufacturing facility with a focus on rotating equipment and specialty valves. Moonlights as the Co-Founder of Citra Studio, an online home goods store featuring our own exclusive designs and collaborations. Roles within Citra Studio are primarily financial, logistics, product engineering, and product sourcing.
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Thank you for joining us today. Please introduce yourself to our readers. They want to know you, some of the background story to bring some context to your interview.
Jess Lemon: I grew up in small-town central Kansas, spending half my childhood in Belleville before moving to Abilene. Always interested in how things worked, I often spent my free time taking anything and everything he could apart to see how it worked (as for putting it back together, that is a completely different story). After graduating from Chapman High School, my childhood pastime turned into my future career path. I attended Fort Hays State University and obtained both an undergraduate degree in physics, as well as a degree in mechanical engineering from Kansas State University.
You are a successful entrepreneur, so we’d like your view point, do you believe entrepreneurs are born or made? Explain.
Jess Lemon: I strongly believe entrepreneurs are made. Sure, there are certain personality sets that tend to seem destined for the entrepreneur lifestyle, but there are so many different entrepreneurs out there who wouldn’t fit the typical personality mold. I myself would have not gotten into the world of entrepreneurship if it wasn’t for experiencing burnout at my first corporate job. Many other business owners talk about how it all “started as a hobby” until they realized there was a demand for their work. Entrepreneurs are made, some by their life experiences, some by a chance occurrence, but always made.
If you were asked to describe yourself as an entrepreneur in a few words, what would you say?
Jess Lemon: Constantly curious, Reflective, New.
Tell us about what your company does and how did it change over the years?
Jess Lemon: Citra Studio is an online home goods store featuring our own designed products and exclusive collaborations with other artists. All of our products are made in limited batches to provide exclusivity and maintain good quality standards. Once a product sells a batch, the design is gone forever. While we have been in operation for just over a year, we have pivoted with each stage of launching. We are constantly learning from all sources and tweaking how we do business based on our learnings. We started out with simple Printful products that would ship directly to customers, then pivoting to more exclusive manufacturers for our first product collection.
The biggest evolution has been in our marketing. Since we are a new bootstrapped company, we do not have the huge amount of funds to dedicate to ad spending. We are scrappy as a result, always testing different ads and channels to look for the best combination to get our name out there.
Thank you for all that. Now for the main focus of this interview. With close to 11.000 new businesses registered daily in the US, what must an entrepreneur assume when starting a business?
Jess Lemon: As an entrepreneur, you must assume that you will not have all the answers. Not when you launch and not when hit 1 million in sales. Whether you are starting your first LLC or scaling your company to 10 million in sales, there will be challenges that you will not immediately have the solution to. The unawareness of this fact leads many founders to suffocate their own companies by trying to control every aspect at all times. For others, this fact leads to slow or no company growth because founders aren’t confident enough to take the next step.
Even worse, some don’t even start. Every entrepreneur should be as prepared as possible, but you will not have it all figured out. Pull back the curtain to find that nobody does. Success is found by the entrepreneurs who face the obstacles and find the solutions they need to keep moving forward.
Did you make any wrong assumptions before starting a business that you ended up paying dearly for?
Jess Lemon: Absolutely. We are a bootstrapped company that started with 10k on a personal loan. We had a small product line and thought we would absolutely need all the promotional material that would ship out with each product. We got all the software and SaaS subscriptions that popped up because we were sure we would need them. After a failed prototype of a product, we had rapidly spent all of our funds with a barely functioning website and no marketing plan at all.
Our site traffic was single digits. We pivoted and pitched in more money to get to where we are now, but we didn’t need 90% of the stuff we thought we did to launch. You don’t need Quickbooks, a shipping app, and promotional packaging when you don’t have any customers. We wasted so much money, but we learned how to be much more frugal with what we do have.
If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what advice would you give yourself and why? Explain.
Jess Lemon: You have to really focus on marketing much more than the products themselves. Content creation and building a following takes a long time and it doesn’t matter how your packaging looks if you have orders to ship. Focus your dollars and energy on marketing your company first, then focus on how fancy your packaging is.
What is the worst advice you received regarding running a business and what lesson would you like others to learn from your experience?
Jess Lemon: I was told that I would need to get some sort of investor funding if we wanted any chance to succeed. This simply isn’t true. It may make the journey a bit longer, but you don’t need a $100,000 investor check to get started. Just start and take it a step at a time.
In your opinion, how has COVID-19 changed what entrepreneurs should assume before starting a business? What hasn’t changed?
Jess Lemon: Absolutely, but this does depend a lot on the industry you are in. What Covid-19 did do was accelerate the trend of online shopping and expectations surrounding online services. Every company should factor this into their business plan.
On the other hand, the desire for human connection hasn’t changed at all. It may take a different form, but the longing for social connection is still there, as strong as ever.
What is a common myth about entrepreneurship that aspiring entrepreneurs and would-be business owners believe in? What advice would you give them?
Jess Lemon: I think a common myth is that you need large amounts of cash to start a business. Million-dollar seed funding rounds are great for headlines, but the vast majority of entrepreneurs start with what little they have and build slowly from there. Many of the hot up-and-coming companies you just start to hear about came are in reality 4-5 years old and just now starting to find success after pivoting their business 2 or 3 times.
My advice is to write a solid business plan, gather the resources you need, and just start!
What traits, qualities, and assumptions do you believe are most important to have before starting a business?
Jess Lemon: A flexible mindset, humble attitude, constant curiosity, and a solid business plan. I believe those to be the most important to have before starting a business.
How can aspiring leaders prepare themselves for the future challenges of entrepreneurship? Are there any books, websites, or even movies to learn from?
Jess Lemon: Is there one single book, website, training, or movie to learn everything from? No! However, aspiring leaders can prepare themselves by constantly trying to learn in any way, shape, or form. Reading non-fiction is a great way to gather new ideas or better your mental state for the challenges ahead. There are likely many entrepreneur-focused organizations in your area that you should join and start to build relationships. Find blogs that relate to your industry and subscribe. Look for leaders in the industry that you admire and follow them on social media for tips and tricks. There is a wealth of free information out there, but you have to search for it.
You have shared quite a bit of your wisdom and our readers thank you for your generosity but would also love to know: If you could choose any job other than being an entrepreneur, what would it be?
Jess Lemon: I am an engineer in my day job so I would definitely pick that. There are many parallels in the work that I do as an engineer and entrepreneur, with daily problem solving being the biggest.
Thank you so much for your time, I believe I speak for all of our readers when I say that this has been incredibly insightful. We do have one more question: If you could add anyone to Mount Rushmore, but not a politician, who would it be; why?
Jess Lemon: This is a fantastic question. After some thought, I think I would add Nikola Tesla up there. A man who was truly ahead of his time.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Jess Lemon for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Jess Lemon or his company, you can do it through his – Facebook
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