Miami Living Magazine features the best Miami has to offer. Click on any magazine below and enjoy. You can download our free app on iTunes. Ideal for iPad and iPhone users.
Issue link: https://digital.miamilivingmagazine.com/i/1538743
as founders and entrepreneurs, not even minority founders and entrepreneurs, but all founders and entrepreneurs are expected to be kind of superhuman. You’re running companies, you have employees, you have staff, and people are looking for you to lead, but they don’t understand that. You may be leading and also struggling. And that’s okay. And that’s where I want FoundnWell to have that voice to say, hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to appear to be this super strong person all the time who doesn’t have any challenges. It’s okay to say, “You know what, I need to step away for maybe a day or two to take some rest for myself so I can be mentally well to run this business.” We’re carrying a lot on our backs, and especially if we’re funded by big VCs and companies, they are looking at us to produce revenue and the bottom line for them. But you can’t get to that bottom line number that you’re looking to get, even as a VC, if your founder is not mentally stable or they’re not well. So mental health is that, really, to me. It’s the foundation of any successful founder or entrepreneur, and the foundation of any business being successful. You can’t have someone at the top leading a business who is not well. As a Black woman leading two powerful wellness brands, what advice would you give to other minority founders who are navigating entrepreneurship burnout? My advice that I would give is that one, it’s important to always take time for yourself. When I started my company, for the first maybe five, six years, I never really took time for myself because of the pressures of having a business, running a business, and wanting to make sure that everybody else was well, but me. I guess my advice would be to always make sure that you’re checking in on yourself. If you’re feeling depressed or if you’re feeling anxiety, if you’re feeling any of these things, know that you’re not the first person and you won’t be the last person to feel those things and also know that there is a community of other founders and entrepreneurs that you can talk to who also experience the same things that you’re experiencing and who can relate to you. Sometimes we keep things in. It’s like we try to hold things in, keep things under wraps. We don’t want anybody to know that maybe we might be struggling a little bit. And I think that does more harm than good. We’re not on a one-man island; this is a community. Anybody who is a founder or entrepreneur is someone who should have access to FoundnWell and should know that we can be founders and we can be well, which is the whole reason why the business’s name is FoundnWell. You’re a founder, and you’re also well. Miami is a melting pot of cultures, ambition, creativity -- but also a lot of pressure. How do you see FoundnWell specifically supporting Miami’s diverse community of founders and entrepreneurs? Miami is a growing hub of entrepreneurs. I just moved to Miami in February, and it’s a booming community. It’s growing with young entrepreneurs in different fields and businesses. And what I see is, again, there is no community that is specifically talking about what we’re talking about with FoundnWell, when it comes to mental health. You have meetups in Miami for founders just to mingle, meet and greets, things like that. But nothing