Jess Ekstrom

It didn't work.

I think when we first met, I was living in our RV and now I'm in a house.

So that, so times have changed.

We have a working toilet, Heather.

This is awesome.

Living the dream over here.

But yeah, I mean, it started for me when I was in college.

I interned at Make-A-Wish, saw a lot of kids losing their hair to chemotherapy, being offered wigs or hats, and a lot of them wanted to wear headbands.

And I call it the dumbest, smartest moment of my life being like 17, 18 years old and just purely moving in problem solution, not thinking about how many businesses fail.

How will this scale?

What's my five year plan?

I was like, I'm just going to find a way.

to give headbands to kids with illnesses.

So I started a company called Headbands of Hope.

For every headband sold, we donate one to a child with an illness, which is what I talk about a lot in Chasing the Bright Side.

And it was not fired right out of the gate.

It wasn't this like overnight success, but it eventually went on to donate millions and millions of headbands, do headbands for the NBA, the WNBA teams.

And the way that I was able to really scale that company was through public speaking.

I didn't know anything about marketing, advertising, couldn't even spell entrepreneur, but I knew how to tell the story.

I could say, I discovered this need.