\201cHave we made it?
From the outside, perhaps.
Not just the financial, but the personal and emotional costs, too.
Being a self-starter is inMeg Strachansblood.
In addition to her father, almost every member of Strachans extended family runs their own business.
I had a pretty informed idea of what it takesIve seen it all.
I was at this little Parisian market where this older French woman was selling vintage jewelry, she says.
I picked up a pair of earrings with a 1920s deco feel.
They reminded me so much of my grandmother, Dorsey, who collected costume and fine jewelry.
She wore her pieces in a way that I had never seen on anyone else.
That was how I decided to start Dorsey: with this love for jewelry and connection to my grandmother.
Manufactured entirely by humans in controlled laboratory environments, synthetic stones are marginally less expensive than mined diamonds.
Strachan recognized the fringe industry’s potentialand profitabilityand wanted in.
Lab-grown will be the dominant stones one day."
I held two full-time roles for the first two years of the business.
I shipped over a million dollars in orders by myself from my house.
Dorsey was all my free time.
I went out to investors in 2019 to raise money.
But I couldn’t raise a dollar of funding.
Nobody would invest, so I had to move forward with the business by bootstrapping it.
I started the company with between $600 and $1,000 [of my own money].
I would take the money from my paychecks and put it directly into [Dorsey].
Im in a double-income household.
At the time, I didn’t own my house, so I was paying rent.
I had an 18-month-old daughter, so I was paying for babysitters and nannies.
You’re personally feeling the exposure every month.
It’s a constant reminder of the financial risk that you’re taking.
I’ll never forget: I was in a meeting with the partner of a very prominent venture fund.
[But] we don’t really know about the lab-grown market.
We asked a couple of girls around the office who like jewelry, and theyre unfamiliar.
That fund turned me down.
All of [those investor meetings] were so devastating.
You get dressed up.
You hype yourself up and work with whatever self-esteem you’ve manufactured for that hour or two meeting.
Youre ready to pitch, you have your deck ready.
And then they reject you.
That was the main emotion I had for the first two years of Dorsey: rejection.
Starting and running a company takes an unspoken toll on your life.
I call it a tab that comes due, and the tax on it is very high.
There are a lot of personal sacrifices.
You have to be ruthless with your priorities.
You miss a lot of thingsthat’s the truth.
I missed the first four years of my daughter’s life.
I missed all of preschool.
Even if I was physically there, I wasn’t mentally there.
But as a parent, I missed some pretty critical years.
I did my absolute best and was there as much as I could be.
And it was necessary [for Dorsey].
But was it worth it?
I went through a grieving process about that because I’ll never get that time back with her.
So, our best investment was finding the budget for great models and photographers.
It was a very big stretch, financiallythe model fees, agency feesbut it was my first investment.
I had this conversation with my dad a few years ago.
He called and caught me in a moment of feeling scared.
I said, The business is doing well, but I’m afraid, Dad.
This is getting bigger, and the financial stuff is building.
He asked me what my worst-case scenario was and it was that I would fail.
Can you handle that?
I thought about it for a minute and said yes.
Then you don’t have anything to be afraid of, he told me.
[Running a business] is an incredibly lonely and isolating experience.
The mental piece is so much bigger than people talk about.
There is only you who’s motivating yourself.
Some of the darkest moments of my life have been running this company.
A lot of self-worth things came upa lot of anxiety, depression, and self-doubt.
What’s weird is that it was unrelated to the company and our success.
We’ve had an incredible trajectory.
We did 600 percent year-over-year growth in 2022, and 100 percent last year.
Weve had a journey that I could never have dreamed of.
Those can be mutually exclusive, very layered experiences.
Being able to pay for health insurance for [my employees] was big.
But the truth is, I have never felt that we’ve made it.
It moved to five million.
So, have we made it?
From the outside, perhaps.
Internally, we are working really hard to make it every single day.
You get fueled by people who actually love your product.
The people who send us emails about how much they love our products.
We’re here because of our clients and our customers.
In the beginning, it feels like a massive weight and only gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Eventually, you learn to put blinders on and do it despite how you feel.
You’re running on empty, but you just keep going.
All of a sudden you’re carrying [that weight], but you feel it a lot less.
One day, you realize that you’ve built those muscles and it doesnt feel as heavy anymore.
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