The Opportunities We Unlock As Solopreneurs

When Angela Shen offered her meals tour enterprise, Savor Seattle, it wasn’t a straightforward resolution—and it concerned many tears. After pivoting her enterprise to curated meals bins throughout the pandemic, Angela wasn’t feeling challenged professionally or personally, so she determined it was time to maneuver on.

However the entrepreneurial drive that made her succeed with Savor Seattle by no means light. After attempting a company job and taking break day to journey, she determined to begin one thing new: Savor the Wild Tours. Her new enterprise provides novel meals experiences in Washington’s native wilderness, resembling mushroom foraging and oyster shucking.

“You ought to be a lifetime learner. In case you’ve stopped otherwise you really feel like, ‘I do know sufficient, I am a professional at this already,’ that is no enjoyable,” Angela stated. “I am having far more enjoyable at the moment than I’ve had in years.”

At Savor Seattle, Angela had a workforce of 30 to 35 workforce members creating and working meals excursions along with her. Along with her new enterprise, she’s a solo entrepreneur and does all of the work herself: discovering places, creating itineraries, and main excursions.

When creating a brand new enterprise, Angela additionally adopted a brand new mindset—much less concentrate on success when it comes to income and extra on offering high quality experiences.

“It will not be 30,000 [customers] a 12 months like we did earlier than, perhaps a pair hundred, perhaps even a thousand,” Angela stated. “That private contact and that affect that we’ve is a lot deeper, and it makes me blissful. That could be a marker of success that by no means was a part of the equation earlier than.”

After proudly owning and dealing on Savor Seattle for 17 years, Angela felt her identification was intertwined with the identification of the enterprise. With Savor the Wild, she tries to compartmentalize work from her private life to avoid stress and burnout. As a one-person operation, she’s in a position to run the excursions on her personal schedule, permitting her to spend extra high quality time along with her household and work on different enterprise ventures, resembling enterprise consulting.

“I used to be fortunate as an entrepreneur to have began a profitable enterprise early in my profession, so I’ve this privilege now of not having all of that stress on me to say my success in life is outlined by this one enterprise,” Angela stated. “I really feel actually happy with that, and my children bought to see that, and I feel now it is about exhibiting them and myself that I am able to extra.”

Along with Savor the Wild having an identical namesake, Angela maintains Savor Seattle’s values of diversity and inclusion in her new ventures. She makes positive every customer feels welcome at every expertise, it doesn’t matter what they seem like or the place they arrive from.

“I do not actually seem like your common mushroom forager. Most individuals I encounter within the woods look very completely different,” Angela stated. “As somebody who’s of minority background and needed to cope with adversity to get to the place I am at the moment, and can proceed to cope with it, I need to make it simpler for others to come back into this area and to take action in a manner that feels protected and welcoming.”

When debating large enterprise choices, different enterprise house owners can study from Angela’s journey, together with the next ideas:

• Keep true to your values. Whereas Savor the Wild provides completely different experiences from Savor Seattle, each companies foster a spirit of journey and inclusion, representing the business owner’s values.
• Kind beneficial partnerships. All through her journey, Angela discovered reliable enterprise companions that helped her assume by way of robust enterprise choices and even related her with the corporate that purchased Savor Seattle.
• Hearken to your intestine. When debating the sale of Savor Seattle, Angela listened to her hunch, main her to a satisfying resolution that opened doorways to new alternatives.

Hearken to the episode under to listen to straight from Angela, and subscribe to Behind the Review for extra from new enterprise house owners and reviewers each Thursday. You can too take a look at our 2021 episode with Angela.

Accessible on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and Soundcloud.