In 2019, we started a small women’s group called Meeting of the Minds (aka. MOTM) after a very small vision board "party."
It consisted of three women, chatting about their respective side hustles. They talked about what they were doing to gain extra income and things that they were struggling with. Even though the group was very small, for each woman that had a problem, there was another woman there that had been there, done that, and lived to tell the story.
This conversation was eye-opening, not only because I was able to see better ways to approach my problems, but I was also able to see what could happen if you added more people with more expertise and more goals. Not only would I now be in a position to help more people with my experience, but I'd also be able to learn from the collective experience of brilliant women.
It was that night at our tiny vision board party drinking a $7 bottle of wine and barbecued popcorn chicken that I realized the strength in having a support group focused on accomplishing your goals.
Raro Lae of Rarolae.com, and co-founders Chant'l Martin and Skye Charlie
We wanted to get more people to attend our meetings and the first one was a huge success! We had nearly 15 women... a giant leap forward from our first meeting. However, slowly but surely our numbers started to fall, less people would attend the meetings. Some days we would have a "meeting" where only one person would show up. Sometimes (particularly when we talked about personal finance) no one would show up at all.
At that point, it got depressing. We were tempted to end the monthly meetings because we were spending all of our time planning and no one was showing up.
Rather than give up on our plan to build a group of women that were totally kicking butt in life, we approached it from a different angle. (If you're familiar with startup buzzwords, this would be our first pivot.) We decided not to talk about personal finance and fitness anymore. In fact, we limited our topics to side hustles, freelancing, blogging, and entrepreneurship. We realized that in trying to reach everyone we were reaching no one.
Mistakes happen all the time and some of the most well-intentioned ideas can fall short of what you imagined. The real goal is to keep going. Revamp your ideas if you need to. The more value you add to others the more people are willing to pay you for it. If you can't get people to show up for free, you're not adding enough value.
We wanted a space for women in the DMV to show up and talk about their goals, be inspired and motivated which is something we are passionate about. Our goal is to pivot until we hit the nail on the head. As long as we keep going, we will one day create the community we can enjoy all year round. Thank you for walking this journey with us.
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