Monique Rodriguez
speaker
1,123 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 26 Mar
Monique Rodriguez’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And we got the call from Sally Beauty. That was our first retail partner. And when we got the call, so Sally's headquarters is in Denton, Texas. And we happened to be there in Dallas for my daughter's gymnastic competition. And they called us like, hey, we want to meet with you guys. We're interested in bringing you into our stores.
What are the odds that, number one, we're in Texas, and number two, like, I wasn't even thinking about retail. I had put Sally's on my vision board to go into retail year five. Because you know in textbook how they say, oh, once you hit five years, you have a viable business. So I was following what the book said. And that was my vision. So God said exceedingly abundantly. And when we got the call,
We told them no because we had our kids with us. And we're like, well, we don't have a babysitter. We're not from Texas. They're like, bring your kids to the meeting. And that was another, like, God moment where I'm like, oh, yeah, this is serious.
And we launched into retail. We had the meeting with them. We launched a following, Planet Graham Reset, which was amazing. February of 2016. And then when we launched, we sold out in every store that we launched in. Come on. So it was like the retail came after us.
And once that retailer had the success that they garnered, other retailers started knocking because they're like, oh, well, we want to have a piece of that pie too. So it wasn't that we were searching for retailers. The retailers came to us. Which is a blessing.
We barely had to pitch. Like it was so effortlessly like us going, we didn't even have a formal presentation when we met with Sally's. It was like, Hey, this is the brand. Our kids were sitting at the round table and it was so informal, but that's how bad they wanted us into their stores.
Oh yeah, it gets more challenging the bigger you are. You know, they always say more money, more problems, right? And that has some truth to it because there are more eyeballs on you. The more challenges are going to come, the more roadblocks. And we experienced a lot of different roadblocks and obstacles. And I talk about a lot of our challenges in the book. At one point, we were not profitable.
And at one point, I did not know if Mayel would make it, right? We were on the brinks of like,
you know the bank's gonna come after us if we don't pay them their money back so it was a very challenging time that people on the outside didn't know because the brand was doing extremely well like the sales were through the roof so on the outside people are like oh this brand is amazing but on the underneath when you look at our financials it was horrible Wow
And we went through this process of having to turn our business around and we needed funding, right? Because at that point we had overspent, which is a common mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make, but we, felt that we had such great conviction that what we were building was still so great that we still had to show up with a smile on our face. We still had to serve our community.
We still had to serve our employees. At one point, we were not paying ourselves so people can come to work and still do the job. They don't hear that, right? We were not making any money.
We had to sacrifice a lot to maintain face because we didn't want our employees to know what was going on because would they have the same level of enthusiasm to show up and work if they knew that the company was suffering on the back end? So those are the moments people don't see. And then once we were able to garner funding, we got a lot of no's.
And I talk about one big no that stuck out to me as a part of this journey, the investors wanted 40% of our company. And it was a bad deal. And we had to walk away from that knowing that even though they were giving us the money that we needed, we were not willing to sacrifice and give that much of our company away because we knew how valuable our company was as we were building.
And I think that's a huge key component for entrepreneurs is that we can't be so quick to take our money from investors because that is a whole another animal. It is a relationship. It is a marriage with whoever you're partnering with. And you want to make the right choice. And I tell people like, Don't dilute your shares early on because what you're building can be so valuable.
So you can have the largest exit ever for a black female or male entrepreneur. The reason why we had the largest exit was because I didn't dilute my shares early on. We sacrificed a lot to not take on that money that they wanted 40 percent.
Right. So we had to just be patient and wait it out until we met the right investors that were willing to invest in us. And patience is the key, right?
Because that patience is pruning you, is building character, is building resilience, is building like that tenacious spirit that we need as entrepreneurs, is building a whole, a new level of wisdom and knowledge that you need to carry on into your next venture or project. Right. And so, um,
Those are some lessons that I wanted to share because it's so easy for someone to say, hey, we're going to give you $2 million for what comes with that $2 million.
And what we'll be left with after.
Exactly. So I just also caution people to be very careful with picking investors, being students of life and always learning and asking questions.
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