071: The Right Name Leads to Business Success with Elegant Entrepreneur Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back

In this ever changing world, in this ever changing market, you have to have new ideas, you have to constantly be getting better, or someone else will be and you will be falling behind.

#00:00:43-5# Neil :   Hello, its Neil Ball, thank you so much for joining me today on the entrepreneur way. The entrepreneur way is about the entrepreneur’s journey, the vision, the mind-set, the commitment, the sacrifice, failures and successes. I am so excited to bring you our special guest today, Danielle Tate, but before I introduce you to her, I have a little quote for you, Dianne Sawyer said, ‘great questions make great reporting.’ The entrepreneur way asks the questions, so we all get the insight, inspiration and ideas to apply in our businesses. Danielle, welcome to the show, are you ready to share your version of the entrepreneur way with us?

#00:01:30-1# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I am absolutely ready, thank you for having me.

#00:01:33-0# Neil :   Thank you for coming on the show Danielle. Danielle Tate is the founder and CEO of MissNowMrs.com. A multi-million dollar online name change company, as a female founder in her twenties, she noticed that a few business guides offered step-by-step advice to smart but inexperienced entrepreneurial women. This void inspired Danielle to author elegant entrepreneur to help other women find their place and flourish within the entrepreneurial world. Danielle, can you provide us with some more insight in to your business and personal life to allow us to get to know more about what you do and who you are?

#00:02:12-8# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Sure, I am an accidental entrepreneur who had trouble changing my name and that sparked the idea for an online name change service. And essentially what Miss Now Mrs does is it turns a 13 hour tedious process of completing forms and standing in office lines, in to 30 minutes online for $30 dollars. And the journey of a decade, learning, growing, building, scaling, stumbling, climbing in that business, has given me a lot of insights and hopefully some wisdom in to the way of entrepreneurs and the way to build a business. And through that journey I noticed a problem and I am a problem solver, and the problem that I noticed is that there are not enough women entrepreneurs starting up and scaling up. And so I recently wrote a book, Elegant Entrepreneur, the female founder’s guide to starting and growing your first company, with the intention of lowering the barriers to entry and success for female founders. And as for my personal life, I am entrepreneur, CEO, mom, wife, daughter, friend and so I wear a lot of hats. I thoroughly enjoy cooking, pottering in my garden, world travel, and reading in the bath tub.

#00:03:32-1# Neil :   Ok thank you for that, your business is about changing names, or you change names, what do you mean by that? Changing names of what?

#00:03:37-9# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   So as a married woman in the United States, you have the option to take your spouse’s last name, actually have 6 options, you can hyphenate, I believe you call it double-barrelling. You can take your maiden as your middle name, you can elect not to change your name, there are all of these different components but the process regardless of what you choose is standing in line to get your driver’s licence and your passport and your social security card and updating your name with the postal service and then all of your banks, credit cards, insurances, mortgage providers etc. so it is a big paying point and 88% of the women who get married in the United States do change their name, so its a large population affected by the problem.

#00:04:21-2# Neil :   So you just give somebody a one-stop shop to sort that problem out, is that what you are doing?

#00:04:23-2# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Exactly

#00:04:24-3# Neil :   Or do you do it for them?

#00:04:24-3# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   We do as much of it as we can, its very similar to an online tax preparation service, so we ask a few questions what’s your name, your new name, polling complete all the appropriate forms’ and then the user prints them and then they receive instructions for each form that are ‘sign here, date here, here’s a bulleted list of everything you need to file this specific to you and your situation and your location.’ And they simply sign the bottom and usually drop it in the mail.

#00:04:52-8# Neil :  Sound awesome, so your book is born out of your experience from being an entrepreneur, isn’t it? is that right?

#00:05:03-1# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   It is, its a third my personal journey, very much as an accidental founder with no business background but a great deal of success, its a third research and the steps, the 12 steps from idea to exit, and then its a third interviews with 28 amazing prominent entrepreneurs, female founders and top brass various offices. And they shared not only their tips and tricks, they also shared how it felt at certain points in their journey and I thought that was important that was something I always looked for in business books. Like ‘I feel this way, is that normal?’ and just being able to anticipate and understand the road ahead of you and some of the things that can come up in business and in personal life and in emotions. De-mystifies the process, and that was very much what I was going for.

#00:05:51-6# Neil :   Mmm hmmm I don’t think I have ever seen a business book that tells you how people feel at that point, that is interesting,

#00:05:56-2# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Every chapter ends with ‘how does it feel?’

#00:05:59-3# Neil :   Really?

#00:05:59-3# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Yes

#00:05:59-3# Neil :   Wow.

#00:06:01-0# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   And its truthful, its the truth. Whether, its not meant to be ‘tell everyone they should be an entrepreneur’ its to give a window in to the lifestyle and most of its amazing but there are definitely some hard moments and mentally preparing and deciding if that is something you want is something all people starting a business should consider.

#00:06:22-9# Neil :   Yeh and what do you enjoy most about what you do Danielle?

#00:06:28-6# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I love having the flexibility and power to have an idea and implement it immediately. I can make things happen instead of wishing or waiting or putting them through channels or hoping they happen and that’s what gets me up and gets me excited every morning.

#00:06:42-4# Neil :   Yeh and what is it that drives you?

#00:06:45-5# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Thats a good question, I have this inner burn to see it all and do it all, and live the best possible life. And you know, with this latest mission to lower barriers and entry for success for female founders, I just have all of these things that I want to do and want to accomplish and that’s what’s driving me.

#00:07:07-2# Neil :   And how do you relax when you are not working in your business?

#00:07:11-2# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I don’t know if its come to England yet, but we have something called Mega Formers here, they are Pilates Reformers but much bigger and much scarier and intense workouts and so, I am a five o’clock in the morning workout person, and that’s how I work through different things and how I work through ideas, and I also enjoy a nice bubble bath and just shutting down the day and just trying to calm down a little bit so I can sleep. Ha.

#00:07:39-2# Neil :   Mmm and do you have any entrepreneurial role models?

#00:07:44-2# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I particularly appreciate Barbara Cochran, she started as a waitress, was one of ten children, and turned a $1500 dollar loan from her boyfriend in to a billion dollar real estate company. You may be familiar with her if you watch Shark Tank. She sits on that group several evenings, and I just appreciate how real she is, she has written two books, I have read both of them. And she just shares the things that drive her and motivate her and some of those align with me and so she is very much a role model and someone I aspire to be like.

#00:08:21-3# Neil :   Danielle, what I would like to do now is talk about the time before you were an entrepreneur, what difficulties did you have to overcome when you started your business?

#00:08:31-7# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   What difficulties didn’t I have to overcome when I started my business? No, to be serious, I have no business background, I have a bachelors in Biology, I am a failed doctor, and so not having had a marketing class, my last computer class was in middle school, overcoming and understanding how to start a business and work a business plan and understand those things was very much something that I had to figure out and took me some time. And also, I was creating a new niche within an industry, the wedding industry here is very established and has very set buckets of caterer, planner, florist, gown provider, venue and so back in 2007 very few things were national and online and so creating the sort of disruptive new technology in a very static industry was something that took some time and was little more challenging because I had no one to model after, there really were no other companies doing what I was doing which was good but also means that I had to figure out pricing and all of my different advertising approaches and how to find customers.

#00:09:44-0# Neil :   And did you have any doubts that delayed you starting your business?

#00:09:48-4# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   You know, I had an amazing sales job, I was the number one sales rep for a fortune 500 company and I absolutely loved what I did. And leaving something that I was so comfortable with that provided such an excellent income to launch a business when I had no idea how to run a business was scary. It delayed me but I did not let it hold me back, It fuelled my market research and validation because I wanted to make sure I was not being foolish and leaving this great thing for something that was not going to pay off. But true to my research it very much paid off and it was an excellent decision.

#00:10:27-9# Neil :   Mmm hmm and what mistakes did you make that slowed your journey?

#0 #00:10:29-1# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I took entirely too long to own my status as an entrepreneur, and get comfortable talking about how amazing my company was. I just always I think maybe coming from such a large company, and from you know a lacking education, I was always sort of waiting to have, ‘oh I have a 100,000 customers’ and now I have the confidence in my business that I need to approach partners and so I waited a little too long, to approach strategic partners, and we had an incident where an individual mind all of the data out of Miss Now Mrs and created a copycat company, and that shocked me and shocked me in to owning my role as a founder, and had me scrambling to lock up partnerships and talking about how great our company was and so to any listeners out there I would say ‘be confident, know exactly how great your company is, know how it fits in to the industry you are entering and do not be afraid to tell potential partners what the benefits are that you offer them right at the beginning.’

#00:11:37-4# Neil :   Yeh and what are some of the things you did before you started your business that would be helpful tips to some of the listeners? who have not yet taken the first step on the entrepreneur way?

#00:11:46-9# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Two dreaded words. Market research. Ha ha, seriously though, I use GOOGLE SCHOLAR to find journal articles so when I was defining how large my market was, I needed to know how many brides so I found out there were 2.3 million brides which is a very large population, and then another article provided that 88% of those brides do change their names so understanding the size of market helped me understand the scope of how big my company could grow. And then surveying friends and asking my target market, my customers or customers to be, engaged women, are you planning to change your name? Would you use an online service, how much would you pay? And on the flip side talking to people who had just changed their name. Was it difficult? What was the worst part again? How much would you pay and asking these things helped me develop the core of what Miss now Mrs does. And I would also encourage entrepreneurs to launch a minimal viable product. I mean your product should work, your website should work, but it does not have to have every bell and whistle that you envision before you launch it. I wanted everything to be pixel perfect, and this amazing experience, and I don’t know that we would have ever launched the company, if I had of attended to every single detail. You just have to get it as good as you can with the money you have and then launch it to customer fund the rest of the build-up.

#00:13:17-2# Neil :   Yeh, what I would like to do now Danielle, is just talk about the entrepreneurial journey a little bit more with you. Do you think culture is important from the beginning in a business?

#00:13:27-4# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I think so, understanding your mission, the value you offer and the way you want to interact with your customers is very important. In Mr and Mrs, we wanted to have the Nordstrom approach to customer service, which means no unhappy customers, we take all refunds requested are issued, we just want happy brides. And evangelists about our product and why it is so great telling their friends, buying gift cards for their friends. Also as a woman, it is important for me to create a culture where other women are hired in to positions where they can grow and flourish.

#00:14:04-5# Neil :   I thought I saw something on this in your book, have you got something on this in your book?

#00:14:10-2# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Its a little bit more except the tone for your corporate culture, never let your mood dictate your manners, so there are twelve chapters to my book, the twelve steps from idea to exit, and then spanning each chapter is an elegant insight, to help make the steps between the big steps easier and more elegant and less clumsy. And so that insight is one that encourages you to think about your experiences, and your other jobs. Think about what you like, think about what you liked, think about what you did not like. Think about who you enjoyed working with and who you did not. As the founder of your company, early on you have the ability to set the precedent for the tone, for the feeling, for the culture of your company, and I encourage readers to really fine tune what they defined success and excellence within a company as, and to make sure they hire people with that vision in mind, who share that vision, especially your first few hires, they really need to be passionate about what you are doing, and they need to align with your personality and with the culture that you are trying to build.

#00:15:14-2# Neil :   Knowing what you know now, is there anything that if you had known it when you started out, would have helped you to short cut the learning curve?

#00:15:22-2# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Yes, securing a mentor and a wedding space would have been incredibly helpful. I suffered from the ‘oh my goodness, someone is going to steal my idea before I get my company off the ground.’ Fear, and that fear kept me from looking around and finding someone in the wedding industry and the wedding tech was just starting to happen, and if I had just reached out and connected with one of founders of one of the early wedding tech companies, it would have been so much easier, to pool our information, to pool our data and to share experiences. Instead of re-inventing the wheel every time I tried to do something.

#00:16:00-5# Neil :   Mmm yeh and how much does gut feeling influence your decisions in your business?

#00:16:05-7# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   So gut feeling is a part of my decisions, but logic and long term vision heavily factor in. I use gut feelings more in personal interactions and decisions, and potential partnerships interactions but not so much in big business decisions.

#00:16:24-2# Neil :  Just going back to your book again Danielle, one of the chapters in there, you call it delegate until it hurts, which sounds fantastic. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that?

#00:16Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Sure, as an early founder its very difficult to let people do the things that you do, I actually compare it to handing your first born child to a stranger, on the subway, its just this awful feeling of I am not in control any more. But as a founder, it is essential to start delegating the tasks that take up your time that are helpful to the business but are not the ones that move the needle. And so for me, it was mapping out what I expected the person to do, doing deep training sessions so I felt like they understood how I wanted it done and what was important to me, and then just letting them go and realising they might do it slightly differently than I but it might be better for them and for the customer. And so by the first thing I delegated was customer service, and so having someone else answering the phone, on email and live chat, allowed me to focus on strategic partnerships, on platform expansions and the things that we are really growing. Miss now Mrs, so it does hurt but you must delegate.

#00:17:39-9# Neil :   Great title, and what advice would you give to other business owners who may be struggling in business?

#00:17:47-8# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Look at what’s working, and look at what’s not very honestly, its easy to be personally wrapped up in your idea in your business and so any time there is a criticism you feel personally attacked, but if you can separate you out from the company and the ideas and look at it very logically, and pinpoint ok, these three things are working, we need to put more time, resources, money in to further developing that and making them happen. And these two or three things really are not working, we need to find ways to either fix them or stop doing them.

#00:18:20-1# Neil :   Life is made of constant change, whether we like it or not, and many people say the only constant in life is change. Danielle, how do you try to keep up with change?

#00:18:31-6# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I have a very simple concept, it is actually an elegant insight, its have a good idea daily. Look at every facet of your business from the website to the communications with your customers to how your product is used to partnerships, and think of ways to improve them, ideas, both big and small and then implement them. In this ever changing world, in this ever changing market, you have to have new ideas, you have to constantly be getting better. Or someone else will be and you will be falling behind.

#00:19:01-3# Neil :   And what is your favourite book on entrepreneurialism, business, personal development, leadership or motivation? And can you tell us why you have chosen it?

#00:19:07-7# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   The greatest salesman in the world. By Aug Mendino is my all time favourite business book, with the all-time worst title. Its a brief book, its written more as a story than as a dry business book, and without ruining it, there are these 8 scrolls or tenant’s that you are supposed to absorb and apply to your life and it made a very big change in my business life and in my personal life and so that’s very much why I would recommend it.

#00:19:42-1# Neil :   Everyone, when you have a busy life, listening to audio books is a great way to expand your knowledge in the time when you may be doing other things, such as driving or when you are at the gym. We have a special offer for you of a free audio book of your choosing, to choose your free audio book, go to www.freeaudiobookoffer.com. As long as you have not already signed up then you will qualify. Danielle, what I would like to do now with you is speculate about the future a little bit, so what one thing would you do with your business if you knew that you could not fail?

#00:20:17-5# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I would expand in to Europe and South America, and overcome language barriers, and simplify more name change for more women globally.

#00:20:26-3# Neil :   Mmm. That sounds fantastic, and what skill if you were excellent at it would help you the most to double your business?

#00:20:34-9# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Graphic design. I have in my head exactly what it should look like and it comes out as these awful stick figures and so many ideas for social media and for messaging and I get hung up on implementing them, and making the cost benefit balance work when I pay one of our designers to implement those small ideas.

#00:20:58-5# Neil :   My singing is a bit like that.

#00:20:58-5# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Ha ha ha

#00:21:02-1# Neil :   Ha ha ha in five years from now, if a well-known business publication was publishing an article on your business, after talking to your customers and suppliers, what would you like it to say?

#00:21:15-0# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I would like it to say that I was an innovative entrepreneur who built an empire and used my journey and book to help change the world for women entrepreneurs for the better.

#00:21:27-7# Neil :   We are now at the part of the show where you share three golden nuggets with us, Danielle, what is your favourite quote and how have you applied it?

#00:21:38-2# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   My favourite quote comes from Aug Mendino’s book that I had previously mentioned and it is, Obstacles are opportunity in disguise. And so when something bad happens in business or personally, but especially in business, I take a moment, actually give myself two minutes to have whatever big emotion I am feeling, if I am hurt, if I am mad, if I am sad, angry all of these things, and then I take that left over energy and adrenalin, and really use it and use it to fuel the search for the opportunity in whatever has happened and I can say in hindsight, its true, something bad happens to the business, and then you create a solution to the problem and improve your product and at the end of the day you are better, personally and professionally for having overcome that obstacle.

#00:22:26-2# Neil :   And do you have any favourite online resources you can share with us?

#00 #00:22:27-3# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Yes, Canva for creating social media imagery, it helps me with that little hurdle I have there. Balsamic for translating ideas in to websites and web functions. And Ask My Target Audience which is a way to have qualified people that you have selected that fit your bucket of customers. Use your website or your app or your product and they record their impressions and suggestions and problems as they work with it, and I think that is an invaluable resource.

#00:22:58-9# Neil :   And what is your best advice to other entrepreneurs?

#00:23:05-8# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Lean in for your start up to stand upright for yourself. It will be hard, you will work harder than your peers in big corporations and traditional business jobs, but all of that hard work, all of those hours you spend, you are doing for yourself. And you are building something for yourself that you can share with your family and change the world with and so it is so worth it, and you can do it.

#00:23:31-7# Neil :   Thank you for sharing that with us. Everyone, if you did not manage to get a note of Danielle’s favourite resource, or her favourite book, you can find the links on Danielle’s show notes page. Just go to theentrepreneurway.com and search for Danielle or Danielle Tate, in the search box. Danielle, is there anything that you would like to add about your business or your book?

#0 #00:23:52-3# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   I would like to add that my book Elegant Entrepreneur, is for any woman with an idea or any woman with a business, its truly a resource and if you know someone who needs a nudge, who has an idea but has not quite committed to building it, its a great little gift and you can get it on Amazon as a paperback or download it on Kindle and I truly do wish to see more women start-up and scale-up so, email me, find my contact information, I would love to help in any way I can.

#00:24:26-6# Neil :   Danielle, it has been an honour having you on the show, you really have provided us with some great advice and insight in to what it takes to be an entrepreneur. So thank you for coming on the show,

#00:24:39-3# Danielle Tate Founder and CEO of Miss Now Mrs & Get Your Name Back :   Thank you for having me, I am absolutely delighted.

#00:24:39-9# Neil :   You are welcome. Thank you.