Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here, where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up, my loves, and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva and I am obsessed with the guest we have on the podcast today. Today I’m chatting with Morgan DeBaun. She’s the founder and CEO of Blavity, the leading media company for black culture and millennials today, and so much more.
On this episode, Morgan and I talk about her rapid growth as a serial entrepreneur; creating a digital community with so much traction; why she, as a Bay Area resident, flew from San Francisco to LA to get her hair done (spoiler alert: it’s because there are so few stylists in the Bay Area who work with textured hair); and how she coaches stylists, salon owners, and small businesses to scalability.
Now a little bit more about Morgan’s backstory. Since launching Blavity in 2014, Morgan has led the company to successfully acquire Travel Noir, a travel platform for black millennials and Shadow and Act, a black entertainment news site.
Under her leadership, Blavity has launched several leading consumer summits, including Summit21 for Black Women Creators and Bay Area’s Afro Tech, the largest tech conference for black innovators and founders.
While scaling the company, Morgan has raised $12 million from top Silicon Valley venture firms such as GV and Comcast. Morgan and Blavity Inc. recently expanded their commitment to driving black economic advancement by creating the nonprofit foundation Blavity.org. Morgan is also the creator of the WorkSmart program, a free business podcast and small business advisory program. We are going to talk about WorkSmart on this episode. You’re going to absolutely love it. You guys, let’s dig in. Let me introduce you to Morgan.
Morgan, thank you so much for being here on the Thriving Stylist Podcast today. I am so honored to have you.
Morgan DeBaun: Thanks for having me.
Britt: Absolutely. My pleasure. I was just sharing with you, I always say everybody misses the pre-show. I was sharing with you on the pre-show that as soon as I found out that this incredible woman exists, I went down such a rabbit hole because I can’t believe how much you’ve accomplished, how much you’ve created. I found myself just so consumed with your energy and your positivity and the way that you made me feel so powerful and encouraged to level up. I think you’re absolutely amazing.
Can you take us back in time a little bit and talk to us about how you got started? Before you were this incredible powerhouse CEO, take us back old school a little bit and tell us what it looked like graduating high school, where you thought you were going, catch us up.
Morgan: Yes. I’m from St. Louis, Missouri, so Midwest through and through. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, so I’ve been around women my whole life. So I was, I think in a lot of ways made this way. My parents, my community were very intentional about sitting in your power and using everything that you can to make an impact on the world.
I went to Wash U for undergrad, which is where the word Blavity came about. Blavity means black gravity, and it’s a term we use to describe all of the black people coming together. It was like a bat signal. One person sits down and then all of a sudden five people sit down. All of a sudden it’s like, where did you guys come from? How did you even know we were here?
It was an incredible experience to me to be around so many diverse folks from different parts of the country, different parts of the world. We all had the black identity, but we all had different experiences of what the black identity meant. Yet we were community, and we felt seen in that moment every day sitting around the lunch table.
When I graduated from school and moved to Silicon Valley to start my career in technology, I was like, whoa, where did everybody go? I felt completely, kind of like a fish out of water in some ways. I was missing that sense of community which is ultimately one of the reasons why I started Blavity with my co-founders who I went to college with.
Britt: Amazing. Tell us for those of us who have not discovered Blavity yet, which P.S. Once you do, this will be your entire week. You’ll just be bingeing. Can you tell us a little bit about what Blavity is and what your mission is?
Morgan: Yeah, so Blavity Inc., we are a media company and portfolio of brands focused on the black millennial and now gen Z audience. They’re five brands, Blavity, Traveling Noir, 21Ninety, Shadow and Act, Afro Tech, and I think it might be missing one.
Britt: Which is impressive, to be like, I think I missed one of my many companies I have! You’re incredible.
Morgan: It’s an incredible group of people. We’ve got 65, 75 employees, mostly based in Los Angeles and we make content and experiences that are true representations of the black experience in this country.
Also, most importantly, we built a platform. We create space for other people to share their ideas. We have huge conferences like Afro Tech, which is over 15,000 people. We have summits, like Summit21. We also do awards and videos and live streaming.
We’re really–you can kind of think of us just like Buzzfeed or Refinery29 or Vice, but for a specific demographic. It’s been an incredible ride so far, but not without its own hiccups as a small business owner and as an entrepreneur.
Britt: Incredible. What sucked me in about Blavity as a user was that, when you said it’s like a community, it was that feeling of community from the start. You do share news and you do share media, but there’s so much feel-good. It’s not–you know how a lot of news and media is very negative or whatever’s trendy, or whatever’s going to get shares and saves and high engagement, high shock value.
That’s not what Blavity feels like, at least to me. It’s a different kind of energy and it has soul and love and connection. Definitely it’s worldly, it’s what’s going on. The fact that a lot of–what it seems like–a lot of your content is crowdsourced, that people can use the hashtag and get featured. It is by the people for the people. This is an incredible community you’ve created. It’s amazing.
Morgan: Thank you. I think to your point though, I think content has changed so much for our generation and even more so thinking about the younger generation. Nobody wants some stodgy brand sitting in New York, all these journalists making the decisions for them on what they read.
We are constantly consuming information, whether it’s a media company or it’s your favorite celebrity or it’s your favorite creator. So we have to keep people engaged, and usually that’s just by distributing. Just being that vessel of information.
If you go on Instagram right now and you want to see what we’re talking about, go on Instagram, go on the search, just #travelnoire, N-O-I-R-E, and you will see people who spend their entire vacations trying to get featured on our main account by using the hashtag. It’s so cool.
Britt: That’s amazing. That’s incredible. That’s such a testament to the beautiful community that you’ve built. I think that’s amazing.
Going back for a second, why didn’t you just stay in Silicon Valley? Why didn’t you just climb the ladder? Why did you decide you had to step out on your own? Did you always know you were going to step out on your own?
Morgan: You know, I’ve tapped out of the corporate world very early on. I was 24 when I started the company. But I did start off at a big tech company, which I think was actually a key part to one of the reasons I’ve been able to navigate the ins and outs and ups and downs of entrepreneurship; because I had a good foundation with a company that is incredible and gave me the knowledge, the teaching, the coaching.
Also, I just got to see how a company could run. I didn’t come from a family of entrepreneurs, so just the basics of business etiquette and communication and presentations gave me a leg up when I was starting my business.
Sometimes it was also things that I saw that I didn’t want to do. Things that I was like, I will never have that here. For example, most of our team is women. Over 50% of Blavity’s employees are women. Most of our leadership team is women. We’re also majority people of color and not just black. We have people from all over the world that work at our company.
That was really important to me because I didn’t have that experience working at the tech company that I was working at, and it made me feel lonely. It made me feel less than and it added an extra layer of stress and anxiety and things that I had to process every day. I couldn’t do my best work necessarily because I had to already filter myself going through the day.
Britt: Makes total and complete sense. I think it’s so admirable that you took what you learned and applied it forward to the business that you’ve created. I think probably to you, it sounds so instinctual, but you and I both know there’s a lot of people who don’t act in that way. I think it’s incredible that you saw your experiences, took it, and said I’m going to be the person who shows you actually what is possible when you don’t do these things. Watch me and see how I can level up.
You touched on something that I talked to you a little bit in the pre show. You were working in the San Francisco Bay Area and you mentioned there weren’t a lot of people who look like you. You were underrepresented even in the workforce and probably even walking through your neighborhood from time to time, completely.
One of the things that I’ve become very aware of in recent years is that there are very few salons–we’re talking to stylists and salon owners today–very few salons in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is one of the largest, fastest growing, most expensive places to live, booming with people, growing rapidly in the entire United States. Booming market, and what you had told me is you could name probably two salons where a woman with textured hair could go and be well taken care of. That’s insane.
Morgan: Even just a stylist, right? The whole salon doesn’t have to accommodate textured here, but can I just have a stylist that knows when I say I want a Diva Cut, they know what I’m talking about? It is a completely different process.
I was really young. I was 22, 24, 25 for the first time away from home and embracing my natural hair. I had gotten relaxers my whole life and started transitioning when I got out of college and transitioning my hair to curly. It was also a very vulnerable period of time, cause you look a little nuts. You’d have these different patterns and some stringy and you’ve got breakage and you really want to be taken care of. You kind of want to go on that journey with a stylist, and I couldn’t find anyone.
You do the things that most black people do. You find the Google groups, you try to find people in Facebook Groups, you try to ask your friends that you meet, Hey, who is your stylist? Because it is a huge part of your day to day experience, transitioning your hair especially. Then once you do transition, you have to learn how to take care of your hair in a different way than you would have if you had relaxed here.
It was definitely a vulnerable period for me. Because I was in a workplace where there weren’t any women of color and black women specifically, I also felt a lot of pressure because all these white people are noticing that my hair looks a little bit nutso and they’re trying to figure out what’s going on.
Britt: I think that’s just so poignant. It breaks my heart to hear that when you wanted to get your hair done, you have to go to Google groups and Facebook communities and ask around and hop on a plane to go–I mean, it’s just crazy, the hoops that you have to jump through to get your hair done.
I’ve talked to so many stylists who would just say, well, I was never taught to do textured hair. So here it is. It’s like, okay, well that’s such a tremendous opportunity…
Morgan: We can’t go to Drybar. We can’t go and get–even now when I’m like, okay, I want to get press and curl or silk press, I can’t go to Drybar. They will break my hair so fast.
Even in L.A., which is where I recently lived, my hairstylists that I go to now because I have blonde hair, I have to get an appointment six months in advance. They’re so booked. There’s so much demand for color management and doing textured hair and just getting your trim and everything. Huge opportunity, huge business opportunity.
Britt: You and I both know great business is built in the gaps. Such an opportunity. Incredible. Okay. So what do you think–you’ve accomplished so much, Morgan in such a short period of time. Do you feel like–something that people ask me a lot is, what is the X factor? What is the recipe for success? How do you know when you have a million dollar idea?
What do you think makes for a good entrepreneur? Did you know Blavity was just going to be this knockout, breakdown hit or, how did you find the strength to make the leap of faith and what do you think it takes to be that bold entrepreneur?
Morgan: Well, I think that there’s a bit of stubbornness and resiliency that goes into being an entrepreneur. I’m sure you’re the same way, having an incredibly successful community. It doesn’t always start off that way. But you have to have the vision and the confidence that you can do it.
What I tried to do is find something that I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had always been a creator and made things and I liked business and I liked creating value. When I got into Silicon Valley I also was like, this is a moment in time where people are creating wealth for our generation. We will look at the Forbes 100 Lists in 10 years and it’s all going to be tech people and it’s going to be people our age. I wanted to be a part of that economy.
I wanted to figure out the business and the brand and the community that I was comfortable serving, also knowing that it’s probably gonna take me 5 to 7, 10 plus years to actually be successful and it’s not an overnight success.
You all are just hearing about me. I’ve been in business for seven years and I’m talking tough years. I’m talking ‘sleeping on the floor’ years. I’m talking ‘sleeping on couches’ years. Not just, oh wow, we’re on private jets. No, this stuff takes resiliency.
But if you pick a business and most importantly, a customer that you love that you’d work for free for because they bring you happiness and joy, then it’s okay. I think that’s sometimes where people go wrong is they focus too much on wanting to be an entrepreneur and not enough on, what problem are you solving and who are you solving it for?
Britt: Hmm. I love that Morgan. To what you said, overnight success takes about a decade; It’s so dang true, and nobody sees the messy beginnings. Maybe they see the messy middle. But they see the shiny at the end and say, I wonder how she did that? Everybody’s out for that quick win, and that resiliency is so incredibly key.
How do you think you found that sweet spot in your market? Here’s the difference. Here’s something that I struggle when people ask me about. You know sometimes there’s something that you love and you’re like, oh my gosh, I love this. I could talk about this all day long. Maybe it should be a business.
How do you know the difference between, I love this really cool thing, how do I monetize it? How do I make money while I sleep with it? Versus this is a legitimate business that I can launch and take off the ground. Do you have any tips and advice for that?
Morgan: Yeah, I think that’s such a good question. It’s something that I think a lot of people are working through especially because the pandemic gave people so much more time to figure out, well, maybe I don’t want to work this corporate job. Maybe I do want to turn my hobby or my interests into something that can replace my income. That’s kind of that transition.
I think that for me, and as I coach and advise small business owners now, I recommend that people actually get really specific on how much money you need to make per month. I actually think that sometimes people aim really high and they say, I want to be a founder. I want to do this. I want to build this huge small business.
I’m like, okay, great. But first things first is you need to replace whatever ordinary income you’ve had and you’re nine to five with your side hustle. What are the actions and steps you need to take to just do that first?
Then, once you have replaced your income and you can be comfortably full time working for yourself, you need to work on the next part of your business which is your growth and building out that full enterprise. I think it takes steps. I believe in having a big vision, but also breaking it down into tangible things that you can do on a 3 to 6 month basis.
Britt: That, what you just said in 90 seconds, is probably the most strategic answer I’ve ever heard anybody give about really scaling and creating a startup or a small business with legs, that actually has some value, that can be tangible in the long run.
You talked about how you coach small business, which is something I’m so excited to dig into here for a minute. I love your program WorkSmart. I asked you at the beginning, do you think this would be great for stylists or salon owners? You said 100%, yes. For the person who is really ready to scale and to what you said, the business already has legs that they already have established a lot of financial security. The demand for their time is already there, and now they’re looking for scalability.
One of the things I talk about a lot on the Thriving Stylist and in my program is what scalability is and what it means. One of the things I love about your program is you have very specific pillars and there is a true process of what you coach through. Can you just talk to us a minute about your coaching, WorkSmart, what it looks like, and what you believe it takes?
Morgan: Yeah, so I have a free podcast called The WorkSmart Podcasts for anyone at any stage. Then the program I run four times a year, once a quarter. It’s a quarterly program. I take between 5 and 15 entrepreneurs and meet every two weeks and we go through, like you were saying, different milestones.
It’s not a niche business that I look for. I look for businesses that have a certain income level and then businesses that also are looking to scale. They want to double, triple their revenue in the next 6 to 9 months. We talk about the business fundamentals.
What does your team look like? What does your time look like? If your time is all over the place, you can’t actually hire somebody else because you have to take care of yourself first. You need to be organized. You need to know what work you’re doing.
Then let’s look at your business model. Are you building business models that only are dependent on your time? For example, as a stylist there is a max amount of people that you can see every single day. So if you have a 10 X revenue goal, that would mean you have to work 10 X time if you only have one business model.
So we got to work through, okay, what does your retail strategy look like? What does your upsell strategy look like? Are you going to add more stylists into your shop? Do you need a shop? Are you going to add consulting? Are you going to add packages and memberships?
We’ve got to work through the business model behind your overall business so that it’s not dependent on you so that you can sleep and go on vacation and buy nice things for yourself and not be completely burnt out. We walked through all those fundamentals of business and I’ve worked with a variety of stylists.
One woman is incredible. She has a curly hair salon in the Dominican Republic. When I first met her, she had just moved to New York. She aspired to build one in New York as well. She was expanding from one to two and she was looking for her for the commercial lease. We went through that negotiation.
She then was looking into building out her own product lines so that she could scale up her brand outside of just her shop and also reduce her cost of goods, so that she could have more profits and she wasn’t buying product from another company. She was like, I can manufacture these products. Well, huge profit. Now about a year and a half later, she’s working on her third location. So it’s very possible to scale.
Britt: I love this. First of all, I love you more and more the more I talk to you. We speak a lot of the same language. I talk about time wealth. I talk about–you were in the service industry and you’re, you’re trading time for dollars until you actually get smart, and you can only do so many blow dries. You can only do so many haircuts.
What I love about your program and the way you speak and what you coach to is that it’s not so specifically niche because when it comes down to is: good business is just good business. You could coach anybody in any industry to good business and they can find that level of success.
I, for one, have definitely been in rooms where I’m being consulted or coaching or masterminding with people who are completely different industries; somebody who does landscaping and somebody who’s in tech or whatever. I do digital education. We can still learn from each other. If we’re talking about good, smart business and you’ve created such an incredible place and space for that. I think that’s absolutely amazing.
Morgan: Yeah. You learn from each other. When I’m in my Mastermind, same thing. I’m like, wow, I would have never approached the problem from that point of view because I’m so in the weeds in my little media world.
So it is really nice, and to get that community amongst your peers where if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re a stylist and you are the most successful stylist you know, one kudos to you, but two, how are you going to get to the next level? You need to be around other people.
Britt: So brilliant. So amazing Morgan. I can just talk to you all day in and out, but we only have so much time. Tell me, where is the best place for us to catch up with you, follow you and learn all the things?
Morgan: Yeah. The best place to find me is on The WorkSmart Podcast, which you can find anywhere you listen to podcasts. Then also on Instagram, you’ll see my crazy life behind the scenes. I’m very–I will tell you all everything, whether I should. My PR team is probably like, oh my God, could she take that down? So definitely check me out on Instagram and DM me or sign up for my newsletter on morgandebaun.com
Britt: Morgan, you’re amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Morgan: Thanks for having me.
Britt: We’ll talk soon.
Morgan, thank you again so much. You always leave me inspired and I am so excited to be able to share you with my Thriving Stylist community.
If you are not already, make sure you’re following Blavity on Instagram and @MorganDeBaun, that’s M-O-R-G-A-N-D-E-B-A-U-N on Instagram. I follow both. If you follow me, you can follow her. You guys, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
