The Black Girl Business Bar

In this episode, Excel Capital Group CEO La Toya Jackson helps break down the importance of business credit for entrepreneurs and offers tips to position yourself for success.

Show Notes

La Toya Jackson is the founder and CEO of Excel Capital Group, which provides business credit and funding solutions for entrepreneurs, looking for capital to start, grow, and scale their businesses.

In this episode, La Toya helps break down the importance of business credit for entrepreneurs and offers tips to position yourself for success. 

Follow the Excel Capital Group on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube. 

Other resources
More on Khalida
 
Khalida DuBose is a business mentor specializing in sales strategy. As a previous crowdfunding coach, she supported more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns and project creators in their quest to bring their dreams, passions, and ideas to the world. Now, she focuses on helping women of color who are early-stage online business owners as they navigate the entrepreneurial journey. For more information on Khalida, visit khalidadubose.com. Follow Khalida on Instagram @khalida.dubose. You can email her at khalida@blackgirlbusinessbar.com.
 
The Black Girl Business Bar is produced by Zuri Berry (@ZMCPodcasts). Music by Vincent Tone and Die Hard Productions.

Creators & Guests

Host
Khalida DuBose
Business + Mindset Coach
Producer
Zuri Berry
Principal Producer at ZMC Podcasts

What is The Black Girl Business Bar?

The Black Girl Business Bar Podcast is for Black entrepreneurial women who crave practical information to implement in their businesses and careers. They want tips and tactics that work and they want on-the-go mentorship that will make a difference in their businesses, projects, and lives.

Hosted by business coach and crowdfunding expert Khalida DuBose, the Black Girl Business Bar is all about letting Black women know what's possible for them in their entrepreneurial journey.

Khalida DuBose: Hi, welcome to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. I'm your host Khalida DuBose. This podcast is all about helping you as a woman of color, increase your sales, overcome your mindset blocks and giving you the practical information that you need to thrive in your business and your life. Today, we're talking to La Toya Jackson, the founder and CEO of Excel Capital Group, which provides business credit and funding solutions for entrepreneurs, looking for capital to start, grow, and scale their businesses.

La Toya, welcome to the show.

La Toya Jackson: Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Khalida DuBose: You're welcome. I'm so excited to have you, I know you have some big things coming up like a Ted talk.

I'll let you talk about that on your own. I was really interested to have a conversation with you because I've seen your posts on Facebook. I think that's where, where I started following you. And I hear people talking about like business credit and things like that. And I was like, even a crowdfunding coach.

And I'm like, I don't really know if I know what that is, but like, I want my audience to know about it. If it's something that could be really helpful. So that's what we're going to be talking about today.

La Toya Jackson: Yes. Yes. We're going to be talking all about business credit. So a lot of misconceptions out there about what it is and what is not.

So hopefully we can give you a listener, some valuable information today. Awesome.

Khalida DuBose: Awesome. All right. So to kick us off, how about you let us know a little bit about you and how you got into this.

La Toya Jackson: Sure. So basically I am originally from Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up very poor. I was raised by a single mom. I have a dad who died from cancer when I was two.

And so, you know, as a child, I just wanted more for my life. You know, looking at your surroundings. I just, I was like, there's gotta be a better way. And so, you know, I don't come from a family of entrepreneurs or real estate investors or anything like that. And I went to college and I read that book, rich dad, poor dad.

And it introduced me to real estate. And I was like, oh wow. You know, I never knew, you know, all of the different ways that you can leverage real estate to, to really acquire some sort of wealth. But I was a broke college student then. So I was like, I don't know how I'm going to get into real estate. You know, I just kinda did what everybody else tells us to do.

Right. Go to school, get good grades, go work in corporate America. You know, go from there. So that's what I did. I graduated got a degree in business, majoring in marketing. And I worked in sales, uh, business business sales for 15 years. And one of the jobs or companies that I worked for relocated me from Cleveland to the DC market.

And when I moved there, I said, oh, maybe now is a great time to get into real estate. So I got my license, uh, started working with longer foster realtors and it was there that I started working with a lot of investors. And they would tell me things, you know, how much they want to get the property for how much they, you know, plan to put into the project.

You know, what the after repair value is. And I would hear them talk about business credit as one of the ways that they would fund the project. What's that, you know, I have a business degree, you know, but I never heard of business credit. What is that? And so, you know, they would tell me, you know, oh, I'm getting my, my business credit of this is going to help me do my rehab.

And so that kind of opened my mind to like, you know what that is. Uh, but then I was still a sales rep. So I was working full-time as a sales rep and then part-time as an agent and I got a promotion. And so I got relocated from the DC market to the Chicago area. And once I moved here, I was covering three states, you know, parts of Illinois, parts of Indiana and parts of Michigan.

And you know, your license doesn't transfer. You got to go back to school again. And I was like, this isn't going to work. I can't show a house if I'm working in Michigan, like this is just, it's not going to work for me. So that's when I decided to go the investor route.

So being new to Chicago, I started going to workshops and seminars and started networking with people. And I started to partner with people to do deals. And so over a five-year period, we did various types of real estate projects, everything from wholesale, Airbnb buying, whole commercial, mixed use commercial, and we raised, uh, close to $2 million. And $300,000 of that was business credit.

Right? Some of that was leveraging personal credit. Some of that was business credit. Some of that was hard money loans. Some of that was leveraging 401k from work. So that was a private capital, you know, raising money with investors and offering them a double digit return.

So within my background, I learned quite a bit about funding. And, uh, one day I went to a women's empowerment event and this woman raised her hand. She was like, what's a DUNS number and how can I use that to get funding for my business? And there was a CPA there and she said, oh, you don't need a DUNS number. You just need, you know, a 720 score, you need to be in business two years, need to have $250K in gross revenue, you need to have personal and business tax returns. You know, you might have to pledge, you know, you might have to pledge collateral.

I was like, that's not a hundred percent true. Like yes, if you go to a bank, yes, they want you to sign your whole life away. You're going to have to have a lot of requirements.

As banks are not set up to take any sort of risks. So they're going to make you jump through hoops. I knew because of my background that there are non-traditional lenders out there that can help you get access to capital without having all of those strict requirements at the bank. And so that's when I decided to start my company Excel Capital Group, because I felt like in real estate, you know, funding options are common knowledge. You know, the different types of ways to, to raise funding, to do various deals. But I feel like in other industries, you know, other entrepreneurs might not be aware of the other funding opportunities available to them. They may just, you know, they may just think of a bank as, as the only place that they can get, get funding. So that's kind of how I started the business and that's my background.

Khalida DuBose: Awesome, that's amazing. I mean, that's typically how you start businesses, right? Like you have some prior knowledge and the, you see a gap in the market. So, hey, maybe I can start a business with this.

So now of course, top of mind is tell us what business credit is and why it's important. Like why, why it could be important for an entrepreneur.

La Toya Jackson: Well business credit in layman's terms is just credit that saying your corporate name, is separate from you personally. So just like on the personal side where you might have a car note or a student loan or mortgage in your personal name, and when you pay those bills, you get it's reported to the personal credit bureaus and you get a score. Business credit is the same way. You obtain, you know, you obtain things in your business name and when you pay those bills, it gets reported to the business credit bureaus and you get a business credit score.

The reason why it's so important is number one it's separate from you personally. So a lot of times, sometimes people personally want to buy a house, right? So let's say you just bought a car or you maxed out some credit cards. All of that is going to affect you and getting this house, right. They don't want to see maxed out credit cards. They don't want to see, you know, high debt to income. Right. So if you had maxed out credit cards and they're on the business side, lenders, don't pull your business credit report. When you're trying to buy a house, they only pull your personal report.

Right? So one of the great things about business credit is it's separate from you personally, meaning that, you know, when lenders go to pull your personal report, they're not going to see anything that you have open in your business name. Right? Because you don't want anything to affect your your debt to income when you're trying to qualify for a house.

So one of the reasons why it's so important is because it does not show up on your personal report. The other reason why it's important is because at some point you're going to run out of your own funds trying to start your own business, right? You might run through whatever's in your checking account. You might deplete your savings.

You might run through your retirement and you're going to have to access capital outside of yourself in order to grow your business and scale it and take it to the next level. Right? So why not leverage other people's money so that you can continue to grow and scale your business instead of burning your own pockets?

Another reason why it's important. It's because it opens the doors for a lot of things. It opens a door for grant opportunities. It opens a door for no loans and lines of credit and your company name, it opens the door for cheaper insurance rates. Like there was a lot of benefits that come along with having business credit.

La Toya Jackson: So yeah, it's really, really important, especially if you want to get access to capital and funding, you definitely want to make sure that you have your business credit profile set up and you've started to establish your history so that when lenders pull your report, they can see, okay, this company know how to manage its debt.

Right. Whereas if you have nothing on your business credit report, they're going to always ask you to do a personal guarantee.

So, okay. So I guess one of the things that I picked up in your intro, you were talking about the DUN, DUN score. D U N S score. And then also, like you just said, setting up your profile, right.

Khalida DuBose: Because I'm, I'm in business. Right. Just going to use myself as an example, I'm a coach and I know I have a business credit card, right. That has a limit on it, but that doesn't does that necessarily mean that I'm set up for business credit or.

La Toya Jackson: No. No. Okay. So when it comes to business credit cards, okay. Let me just step back.

When it comes to business credit, there's two ways to obtain it, right? There's a fast way, and there's a slow way. The fastest way to obtain business credit cards is if you have great personal credit. So if you have a 700 score higher, you could qualify for up to 150 K and business credit cards within two weeks.

Now you have to have a strong profile for that, right? You have to have the 700 score, no judgements, no liens, no bankruptcies, no collections, no foreclosures. If you've had all that stuff, it had to be, you know, in the past and you've established credit since then you have to have at least three years of credit history, you have to have at least 5K.

La Toya Jackson: There were more and credit card limits, cause you generally qualify for three to five times that, you have to have no more than six inquiries, uh, within the last, uh, two years for each credit bureau, and, utilization. They want you to be, under 30% have at least three years of credit history.

When you meet those guidelines, you can qualify for business credit cards. The thing is not all business credit cards are reported to the business credit. Sometimes they report to the business credit bureau. Sometimes they report to the personal credit bureau. Sometimes they report to both. Sometimes they don't report to either one.

So it depends on how you obtained your card. And if they report, sometimes it's not on your personal, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's on your business report. If it is on your business report and you're paying it on time, then yes, that's going to help you with having a certain number of trait lines and having a good score.

But it just depends on how you obtain that card. And if they were. If they don't report, then it's not helping you establish credit with your EIN.

Khalida DuBose: So you basically need to make sure you, so does that mean that you need to make sure you go set up a profile? Like, I guess I'm trying to, I'm trying to make it practical for people like. Because I I've heard myself personally. I've heard this a lot, you know, like you can do, you know, all these things. I, I think I was following somebody recently who was just like in the whole Airbnb space. And they were like, oh, I did this because of business credit, you know? And I was like, right. I was like, wait, what?

You know? I think people don't understand it practically.

La Toya Jackson: Yeah, I mean, and I've used a business credit cards and Airbnb and used it in my real estate deals as well. We used it. See, we had an Airbnb that was two floors, four bedrooms, three baths, and we use the car to furnish everything in it. We used, business credit to, to furnish all the furniture.

To help pay for our first and second month's rent, like we least displays in our business name and they rented it out as Airbnb. So you could totally do that. And it doesn't matter if you leverage your personal credit to get a business credit card, or if you did it, the EIN. You know, either way you can leverage that money to do Airbnb.

La Toya Jackson: You can use it for Touro. You can use it. If you are doing a buy at whole, you can use it. If you're doing a fix and flip, you can use it for stocks and bonds. Like there's so many different ways that you can leverage a business credit to either make more money, with passive income or grow and scale your business.

So your profile is really. Just, you know, how your company is set up so that when lenders go to evaluate your business, if you're set up the right way, then you can qualify for funding. A lot of times people don't have their business set up the right way and that's why they don't qualify. You know, a lot of loans.

I mean, the main thing is, well, look at PPP or Eido some people didn't qualify because they didn't have a business bank account. He didn't have revenue going to a business bank account, or they're not paying themselves or paying their employees. Right. It was all about being set up the right way. If you don't treat yourself like a big business, these lenders won't treat you like that either.

So you have to blame them. You can look like you need to look like a big business, even though you may be a small business and it's not expensive to do.

Khalida DuBose: Right. Okay. Okay. That's perfect. That, that clarifies it for me because I was like, okay. I do not even know. So I'm going to bring her on the show, ask her, ask the expert.

So I'm interested to know what other funding solutions are available for like small business owners.

La Toya Jackson: There was a lot of funding solutions. It just depends on how fast you need the money, how much you need. And, uh, which way you want to go. So we talked about business credit, right? So if you have those, the 700 score and the great profile, you could qualify for business credit cards, you usually get 0% interest anywhere from six to 12 months.

And all you have to have is your business set up and meet those credit guidelines. You can get that to two weeks. If you want to leverage personal is pros and cons to doing that. the other way is to do it with your EIN. That takes a lot less. Right. So you gotta, you gotta set your business up the right way.

So there's 10 steps in the credibility process to make sure your business is set up the right way. Right? Making sure you got your entity set up, making sure you got your DUNS number, your business bank account, you know, making sure you got your address, your phone number, all of those things, making sure that's set up the right way.

Then from there, there's four tiers of building business credit. So everybody wants to jump to tier four, right? Tier four is the top tier that everybody's striving for. That's where you get the company car with your EIN and no personal guarantee. That's where you get the Visas and the MasterCards with no personal guarantee. Right?

La Toya Jackson: But you can't start there. You got to work your way up to there. So tier one is not the sexy credit, right? It's the, the, Granger's the Quill. They might give you a $500 line or net 30, where you can order something from them, get the merchandise now and pay for it at a later date. Once you secure enough trade lines in tier one, you can go on to tier two and then you'll have access to higher, more revolving type of credit.

You know, maybe 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 with Amazon, you know, Lowe's Home Depot, you know, Menards, you know, different places like that, or even the fleet cards. So maybe you use your car for business. There's tons of fleet cards out there to have a lot of great benefits. Maybe you want to save on. Maybe you need to buy the tires.

Maybe you need an oil change. Maybe you need some other parks that come along with that. Right? So once you have enough trade lines from tier one, two and three, and then tier four is where the business could start to qualify for things without the personal guarantee. So, so you can do it with your personal.

You can do it with your EIN. There's other products, too. If you have great personal credit, you can qualify for a term loan. A personal term loan is a loan that you pay back in three, five or seven years. So you have to meet those same credit guidelines, but you also have to show that you have income of at least 40,000 a year or more.

If you can prove that. To your tax returns. So you could qualify for up to 300 K and you get that in two weeks. Now, the interest is high it's anywhere between five and 15% based on your score and your profile. However, you get the money in two weeks, you had to pay it back in three, five or seven years.

And if you can flip that money quickly, then it may be worth the high interest. So that's a personal term loan. It goes on your personal report. But you can use it for your business or you can use it however you wish. So that's another funding option. Another one is a passion, a personal cash line of credit.

That's revolving is up to 50 K. Sometimes people qualify for one or two revolving lines. So again, you need that strong profile. That 700 score. You have to show 40 K in gross income for the last two years of tax returns. And you may qualify for that. Sometimes people qualify for both. Sometimes they want some business credit cards. Sometimes they want some term loans because sometimes they want something liquid. Sometimes they want something on a card.

So you have those options too. Of course, there's personal credit cards. If you want to go that route, now you can get like 0% interest for up to 18 months, which is great. So you have those options as well, but again, there's pros and cons to each and you got to know the pros and cons before you figure that out.

Now, outside of that, there's other, grants. So like in my membership program, I provide a list of grants to all of my members every single month, letting them know about all the funding options that's available to them. So whether it's a pitch competition, whether it's an accelerator program, whether it's some sort of grant.

You know, there's tons of grants out there for women, for minorities, for, you know, veterans, right. There's tons of grants out there. And so I'm provided that updated list every single month. So they know what's available.

And then there's kind of the non-traditional type of lending options through like PayPal and Stripe. So based on, you know, the transactions that you have through your merchant provider, you may be able to get a working capital loan through them that is only based on your business. And, you know, you don't have to, to, you know, it's not a personal guarantee, so there's many, many funding options available. And so, you know, it just depends on again, how much you're looking for, how fast you need the money. And which option you want to take.

Now leveraging personal, you can get it in two weeks or less, leveraging your EIN takes longer. You know, industry experts say it could take a year or longer, and that's true if you don't know what you're doing, right? If you don't know what vendors to work with, right. Cause not all of them report to the business credit bureaus, lenders have up to three months to report your payment history. So that can take a while. Right. And so. I show people how to do it in six months or less go from tier one to tier four, but it can take longer if you don't know what vendors to work with.

And, again, it, it, it, they have up to three months to report payment history. So if you think about four tiers, that can take awhile.

Khalida DuBose: Interesting. Yeah. So, you know, this kind of makes me wonder, like, but are there businesses that some of these funding options kind of lean towards, for instance, like real estate? I guess what I'm trying to ask is, you know, we're in the online space and so a lot of people have coaching businesses. Would those be businesses that could really tap into using some of these funding options?

La Toya Jackson: Absolutely. Absolutely. I would say there are more. Riskier industries than others. Right? So banks and lenders, they see real estate as risky. They see strip clubs as risky. They see casinos as risky. So there are definitely some industries where it's going to be harder to qualify for funding. but online culture and consulting.

I don't think that's one of them. As long as you've got revenue coming in every month, they H banks generally like to see to. K or more, if you have consistent revenue coming in every month that you're not in those high risk industries, then you can still get access to capital.

Khalida DuBose: Okay. That's good to know.

That's very good to know. So what are, could you give us like three tips, for getting started with like, if you're a person who wants to build business credit or you want to go a different funding route, give us like three tips to get, get us going.

Three tips. So tip number one is to set your business up the proper way from the very beginning. Sometimes as entrepreneurs, we might have a hot product. We might got a, you know, a great recipe, right? We, we we're, we're getting sales and we're excited and we're growing. Well, we forget to set up the business the proper way. If you do not set up the business the proper way from the very beginning, it could cost you later on down the line.

La Toya Jackson: And like I said, the big biggest example is that is when PPP came out and EIDL. A lot of people didn't have business bank accounts, you know, where their revenue was going to the business bank account. A lot of people didn't have their entities set up or structured the right way. So I would say the first thing you gotta do is such a business up the right way.

You know, if you're not sure you might want to talk to an accountant or an attorney to see which legal entity is right for you. Just because people on Instagram say, go get an LLC, that might not be the best one for your business or your industry. So find out that right from a tax and legal standpoint, find out which entity is the best entity for you.

Now I will say a sole proprietorship is not it. You cannot establish business credit with a sole proprietorship. I mean you can, but you will have a lot of limitations. So I definitely recommend a LLC, C Corp, S Corp, you know, one of those. Set up your business the proper way. Not only does it help you in the long run when you're trying qualify for grants, loans, lines of credit, different things like that, but also count towards your years in service, your, your, your years in business.

You know, when I first started my first business in 2014, I didn't know what I wanted my name to be. So I just put my first initial, my last initial and then put enterprise.

And in two years later, when I figured out the name that I wanted, I switched it over. Now that was a pain in the butt, but because I did it that way, I was already in business for two years. Right. Even though I wasn't sure what the business was going to be and what I was going to do with it, or what name I wanted.

I still got those two years in service. So incorporate or set up your company as quickly as possible. So that would be my first step going through the 10 steps in a credibility process. You got to do that anyway, to set up your business. So that's, you know, making sure you got the right entity, making sure you got your EIN, making sure you get your DUNS number, making sure that you have the right email address, the right website domain.

You don't want to be you at Hotmail. You at your company name. It's your domain. These are all the things that lenders look at to make sure you are legitimate business.

Right? Your business phone number. Right? A lot of people use their cell phone for business. That's not what you want to put on business credit applications. You want a phone number, a business phone number that's dedicated to your business. That is not a cell phone number. I'm not saying don't use it. Just don't use it on applications, right?

Even with your business address, some people like to go to ups and the FedEx and get a P.O. Box. Lenders don't want to Google your business and see a UPS store. So you can use a home address or you can use a virtual address. But you know, it's small things like that to just make sure that when these lenders and creditors are looking at you, that you look like a legitimate business, because you took those steps, even with your, your business name. You know, lenders will check the secretary of state and the IRS to see if it matches.

So sometimes people forget a dot or a period or abbreviate. That stuff can cause you to get denied on applications, because this is not a manual review. They're using their artificial intelligence to verify that you're a legit company and they're not going to say, oh, well let me check. No, if it don't match, automatically denied.

So like, if your name is 5-Star Inc, with IRS and 5-Star Incorporated with the secretary of state, guess what your applications are getting denied. Because it doesn't match, you don't look like legitimate business. Right. So it's very, very important that you take those 10 steps and set your business up the proper way so that down the line, when you need funding, when you need lines or loans or unique grants, your paperwork is good to go. You know, you got your, your entity, your article, you got everything. So that would be number one, set your business up the proper way.

The next thing, and this has nothing to do with business credit, but the next thing I would recommend is your, your bookkeeping and your taxes.

You know, in my first business when we failed, that is something that we were not on top of, and it's very, very important. And a lot of times people don't realize how important that is until they miss out on some sort of opportunity because they don't have it done, you know, and that's not fun to have to go back and redo that stuff later.

La Toya Jackson: So even if you're not making a ton of money, either learn how to. You know, record transactions in QuickBooks, or work with a bookkeeper or an accountant or a CPA. That would be the next, next thing that I would say. And the last step would be start to establish your business credit as quickly as possible.

Even if your business hasn't made any money yet, even if, you know, you're still working on your personal credit. You want to take the steps to build your business credit as quickly as possible. One, it takes a long time. But two, you want to be able to have the money available when you need it. Most the time people come to me and they say, hey, I want 50K. I want to do my EIN. Okay, great. It's going to take up to six months. You need to start before you need the money.

Khalida DuBose: Yeah. I like that. Start before you need the money.

La Toya Jackson: Before you need it so that when you need it, it's there for you.

Khalida DuBose: Right.

La Toya Jackson: You know, my friend Ana just spoke at an event yesterday. And she was talking about how she got a loan. She was like, I don't even meet it right now, but when I do, I can tap into it.

Right. And so if her business wasn't set up the right way, she didn't have the revenue going into a business bank account, she probably wouldn't have qualified for that. And now she has this line of 50K that she can use and she can tap into it when she can.

And you can use business credit for so many things. I look at it like, you know, an extra amount of liquidity or emergency in the event that you need it. Do you need to hire new people? Do you need to expand? Do you need a vehicle? Do you need to pay some staff? Do you need to do some marketing or some advertising? Right? And if you don't want to deplete everything that you got, right, you can leverage these funding opportunities so that you can free up your cashflow, and still make money.

Khalida DuBose: I love that. Thank you so much.

Yeah. I just, I think, you know, that's the point that, uh, you know, we want to drive home as like really just being set up properly from the beginning.

And I think you're right in the online space, we hear a lot of just, you know, just get started. Don't worry about, you know, all this stuff. There are things you don't have to worry about all the time when you're first starting, but I think this is very important.

Khalida DuBose: And then the second point is just making sure you're talking to somebody that, you know, your bookkeeper, having an accountant, my bookkeeper happens to me in my little sister who worked for big four and she was a auditor.

So she's really on top of her stuff. But yeah. You know, just really making sure you have that person and I'm that person I'm like really obsessed. I'm like, okay, let me just make sure everything's perfect now. So it doesn't bite me later. That's, that's, that's a big thing for me. So.

Exactly. I think some people think that, oh, I don't have the money to, to set up a LLC or I don't have the money for this.

Well find it. Right. You know, or, or find someone that's within your budget, you know, and here in Illinois, a LLC is $150 now, it used to be $500 when I first moved out here.

That's what I was going to say they're not even that expensive anymore.

It's not as expensive as you would think. And even with bookkeepers, I mean, you could find someone within your budget, but that stuff's really, really important.

Like I said, when you can't qualify for something, that's really where most people get it together, either can't qualify for something or you get audited, and now you owe a bunch of money. Or you're paying penalties. That's when people start to realize how important this stuff is.

So ladies, we don't need to go that route. We don't always have to feel the pain, get our stuff together. Right. We didn't always get to meet, go through the pain stuff. So I want to know, you know, before we have to head out, I want to talk to you about, so you're doing a Ted talk.

La Toya Jackson: Yes.

Khalida DuBose: In February. Tell us a little bit about that. What's going on with that?

La Toya Jackson: Yes. Okay. My TedTalk is February 10th and it's at 6:00 PM. And the theme of the Ted talk is, uh, the comeback is greater than the setbacks, right? And I'm going to talk all about my entrepreneurship journey. And like I said, this is my second business. My first business was not successful. made every mistake in the book. That's why I can talk now about setting things up the proper way from the very beginning, because I made all those mistakes in my first business and it cost us dearly.

And so I had a lot of setbacks. I never thought I was start a new business. I really didn't. When the last business failed, I thought that was it. This is over for me. This must not be what I'm supposed to do in life. Let me go back to corporate America and get a job because this did not work for me. No one talks about how hard entrepreneurship really is.

And so, uh, it took a lot to, to get back. Get back to starting another business and learning from all the mistakes that I made for the first, like I said, we didn't have our bookkeeping or we didn't have our systems.

So we were going to tell you, we made every mistake in the book and it bit us in the, in the butt at the end. And so that's why I'm such a stickler about it now because they don't teach us in school. They don't, you know, they don't teach us in college. Like entrepreneurship is a lot of learning as you go.

And it's almost like you, you wish someone could have told you this. Uh, in the beginning, Hey, you should do this. You should do this. You should do that. Right. And so my talk is all about all of the setbacks and the struggles that I had in my entrepreneurial journey and how that sets you up for a greater comeback.

So, uh, for entrepreneurs, you know, you're going to face challenges, you're going to face setbacks. But don't let that break you because all of those painful lessons. You need it. You almost need to make mistakes and not be afraid to make mistakes in order to learn from them and for it to help you for something for, you know, moving forward.

And so my talk is all about my journey. Like I said, we made every mistake in the book, lost money, credit, like all of it. That's why I can talk more about it now, because I didn't know the pros and cons of leveraging personal credit. I didn't know what will happen if you did a deal and you didn't make a profit and lenders could come after you.

Like, I didn't know any of that. I was just like, oh, I got great credit. I got income. Okay I'm about the qualify as much money as I can. Right. You don't know what you don't know. Right. And you need to know the pros and cons of leveraging. Because yeah, it can be devastating when you have to rebuild and start over from scratch.

So basically my talk is going to be all about the setbacks that many entrepreneurs face, including myself and how you can use that for a greater comeback.

Khalida DuBose: That's beautiful and

La Toya Jackson: How those lessons, no matter how painful, can be worth it, uh, when it comes to something greater.

You know, your first business may not be the last business that you do. You do have to try different things so you can figure out what's for you. I tried many different real estate strategies and realized I only like rentals. I'm like wholesaling, I don't like Airbnbs. I don't like fix and flip. I like rentals. I like to do the work one time and get paid every single month. That's my favorite real estate strategy.

Right. I had to try different things to figure out what works for me. There's a lot of strategies out there that they all work. But what, what is your risk level? What is your tolerance? What, what do you like?

To me fix and flip felt like a job. Why did I leave my six figure job to create a new job for myself?

You hear every day managing people, right? I, I got in this to make more money and work less. I'm working more than I did when I was working. So you're going to try some things until you figure out your niche, your niche, your calling, what you're great at, what you're comfortable with. Right. And don't have shiny object syndrome. Cause we had that too.

Oh this person is making a 100K in Airbnb. This person is making that. And we were all over the place. It's just like pick one thing. Get good at that one thing, get that stable, get that up and going. And if you want to just get a score or some other things after that, then do that.

So yeah, I'm definitely going to be talking about my journey, my struggles, I, I, it took me a while to get here, like what our business fell apart. I had to go to therapy, all of that. Cause I was devastated. I never thought my business was failing. I'm like a high achieving person. Everything I did up until that point was successful.

So when my business, you know, went left. I couldn't believe it. It was hard to deal with.

Khalida DuBose: Which is probably what took you a little bit of time to like, reset. Like, should I go back?

La Toya Jackson: Oh yeah. I had my idea when I went to that entrepreneur women's empowerment. I did, I, that was the time that I got the idea, but I didn't start the business to a year later. Because I wasn't sure if I should go back into entrepreneurship.

Yeah, right. And the only reason I moved forward is because I met AC Green, I told them what I could do, and he was like, let me put you on a radio show. And then that was the birth of my new business.

Because I was like, man, my first business failed. I don't know if my next business will be successful. So anyways, I'm grateful for everything that I went through, even though it was hard, even though it sucked. Even though, you know, it was a lot of dark days, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons that I took with me to this business.

So the Ted talk is all about overcoming whatever setbacks and challenges you have and how the, the comeback will be greater than any setback that you ever had to experience.

Khalida DuBose: I love that. Where can people find that Ted talk? Because I think when this airs, you might've completed it like five days before.

Cause I think this is due to air February 15.

La Toya Jackson: Okay. So the Ted talk, that the Ted talk that I'm a part of is Ted X RushU. So here in Chicago, there's rush type in TEDx RushU, you will be able to find it. It'll also be on YouTube. Again, my name is La Toya Jackson. It'll my title is, you know, Minor Setbacks, Major Comebacks.

So you'll be able to see it on YouTube when it airs. But, you know, hopefully it will inspire someone to continue on their entrepreneurship journey and, to not give up, even though, as it's going to be hard, like I said, I didn't see failure coming. I like when we started our real estate business, I thought we're going to be able to have a world that was going to be millionaires and was going to be rich like failure did not even cross my mind.

Khalida DuBose: Which is great. That's probably a good thing.

La Toya Jackson: When it, when it happened, when it was like, Jesus. But yeah, you know, it just makes you a better person in the long run. So now I can smile about it and talk about it, but back then.

Khalida DuBose: Well, everybody gets to learn from you and gets the benefit of your knowledge.

Thanks you and appreciates you for going through all of the hard struggles that they now can learn from.

La Toya Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully you can inspire and help somebody. And like I said, I, I take everything that I learned and try to educate people like this. You need to do this, you need to do this, you need this.

And why, so that, Hey, you could qualify for X, Y, and Z. There was some things I probably could have qualified for at the time that I wasn't even aware of. Right now. I was like, dang, if I would have applied for this, when I was here then I could have more. So now I try to educate people on all the options and then you could pick it, tell you the pros and cons, and then you could pick the option that's best for you.

Khalida DuBose: All right, so thank you so much, La Toya. I feel, I definitely feel a lot more informed. Anytime I hear these warnings. I'm like, okay, let me talk to my bookkeeper.

Make sure everything with me. So I hope the ladies out there who are listening, especially the ones who've reached out to me and have asked me questions about business credit, uh, took note, and this was helpful for you. So let us know where we can find you where people can follow you as we head out.

La Toya Jackson: Absolutely. So again, my name is La Toya Jackson, founder and CEO of Excel Capital Group. You can find us online at our website, excelcapitalgroupllc.com. Or you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We also have a YouTube channel. So feel free to reach out. If you are looking to learn how to build business credit with your EIN, or you want to know about, financing or funding options for your business, just reach out and we will help you.

Khalida DuBose: Awesome. Thank you so much for that.

La Toya Jackson: Thank you.

Khalida DuBose: All right, friends. Thank you so much for hanging out and listening to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast, and a special thank you to La Toya for joining us today and sharing so many gems with us. If you haven't already hit that subscribe or follow button. And if you found today's episode helpful or had any ah-ha moments, La Toya and I would love to hear from you.

So make sure you screenshot this episode and tag us on socials. We'll have all of our tags in the show notes. We're dropping episodes every Tuesday and we can't wait to see you back then.