Latest / Small Biz Florida / Ep 418 | Start with the Problem: Building a Business Customers Need with Kathrine Zobre

Transcript

Ep 418 | Start with the Problem: Building a Business Customers Need with Kathrine Zobre · Small Biz Florida

• 0:00
  Welcome to Small Biz Florida, your go-to podcast for all things small business in the Sunshine State.
• 0:08
  This podcast is sponsored by Florida First Capital, your trusted partner for financing and support.
• 0:13
  Here, you'll discover the latest news, trends, and invaluable resources to help you grow and succeed.
• 0:19
  From startup strategies to scaling your business, we've got you covered.
• 0:23
  Join us as we explore the vibrant Florida small business ecosystem
• 0:27
  and connect you with the experts who can make a real difference.
• 0:31
  And now, please welcome your host, Tom Kindred,
• 0:34
  Regional Director of the Small Business Development Center at Indian River State College.
• 0:39
  This is Small Biz Florida, the podcast and broadcast that's all things business across the state of Florida.
• 0:45
  And if you've been tuning in lately, you know, Small Biz Florida is on the road again.
• 0:49
  We are in Charlotte Harbor at the beautiful Sun Seeker Resort.
• 0:56
  And it is all about small business here.
• 0:58
  It is the 2026 Small Business Success Summit, all brought to you by the Florida SBDC Network.
• 1:06
  The room is absolutely chock-a-block full of small business owners, operators, entrepreneurs.
• 1:12
  The lobby is full of vendors, exhibitors, resources, and support agencies for those entrepreneurs and small business owners.
• 1:23
  We have the opportunity right now to talk to one of the summit speakers.
• 1:31
  It is Catherine Zobri, who is the creator and the founder of the Founders Playground.
• 1:39
  Catherine, welcome to Small Biz Florida.
• 1:41
  Thanks, Tom.
• 1:42
  Absolutely.
• 1:43
  So, Catherine, we appreciate your support of the Small Business Success Summit here.
• 1:50
  We appreciate you being a speaker.
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  Let's start as we always do.
• 1:53
  A little bit of your background, pathway to creating the Founders Playground.
• 1:58
  Thanks.
• 2:00
  So, I'm an accidental entrepreneur.
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  I pretty much always was hustling for something.
• 2:07
  My first unsuccessful business was I found really pretty rocks in the gutter and walked around the neighborhood trying to sell these beautiful little gemstones that I thought I'd found.
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  Mind you, I'm seven years old at this point.
• 2:21
  And the first successful entrepreneurial venture I had was a hot August day.
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  And a number of the houses in our neighborhood were getting their roofs and sidings redone.
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  And I opened up a lemonade stand.
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  And that was when I realized that small businesses solve a problem in the community.
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  And if you can identify a problem that you can solve, you're going to be successful, especially if you have proximate or otherwise access to your customers.
• 2:49
  And so, you know, I didn't study business, but I've always worked for small businesses.
• 2:55
  I did a stint in banking for a little bit and then eventually got connected as a Small Business Development Center advisor in Alabama.
• 3:03
  Roll Tide.
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  Sorry.
• 3:04
  Florida fans.
• 3:05
  And then I got picked up by an accelerator and I was their director of training for about a year.
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  And I expanded their training programs from about touching about 10 to 20 entrepreneurs per year to over 2100 in about a 10 month period of time.
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  And I saw the impact of not just getting connected to cohorts and peers and compatriots that are doing something similar or something completely different.
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  And that's how I really found the power of getting connected to entrepreneurs, not just mentors, not just advisors, but really building the support network that you need in your community.
• 3:51
  So Founders Playground, really support organization itself in some way.
• 4:00
  Basically, a management consulting firm to use a common term.
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  But I want you to explain it.
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  Purpose, mission of the Founders Playground.
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  Yeah, we support entrepreneurs through larger organizations.
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  But we do work one on one with entrepreneurs as well.
• 4:19
  And I'm either brought in or my team is either brought in as kind of fractional leadership and support or for a particular project.
• 4:27
  So I'll be brought in as a grant writer or to take an existing program and develop it out to something that's really customized to meet their audience.
• 4:38
  You mentioned a key word in your opening comments.
• 4:46
  You talked about the problem.
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  If you can identify the problem and create that solution, you can be successful.
• 4:51
  I love that because that's exactly what I teach my entrepreneurship students.
• 4:56
  I say people will pay you to solve their problems.
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  Take me on a little deeper dive in your world of the problem.
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  I love to I love to spend a little time with my students because, you know, it sounds easy to say, oh, you know.
• 5:13
  Well, I'll tell you, I go back even one step before that.
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  A lot of times I'll talk about the problems and my students want to talk about their problems.
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  You know, I don't have the money to start the business.
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  Where am I going to find the customers?
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  I say, wait a minute.
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  Those are operational problems.
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  And then those are important to deal with.
• 5:33
  But when we talk about problem and entrepreneurship, we're really talking about your client, your customers problems.
• 5:39
  Take me on a little deeper dive into that.
• 5:43
  That whole concept of the problem that your client or your customer is facing.
• 5:49
  Sure.
• 5:50
  So I was actually just designing two workshops this morning for for a new client of mine.
• 5:57
  And they are just on problem identification and what makes a good problem.
• 6:01
  And when we say problem in entrepreneurship, what we're really talking about is a pain point.
• 6:07
  Some irritation that somebody is trying to solve recognizes is a problem for them.
• 6:16
  On the other side of that, it's also helping people achieve a desire.
• 6:21
  So, you know, I think problem is the most commonly used.
• 6:25
  We see it often in the lean business model.
• 6:27
  That first box on the left hand side is the problem solution.
• 6:31
  We got the customers in the middle, right?
• 6:32
  Right.
• 6:33
  That problem identification process is really about empathy and it's really about noticing.
• 6:38
  And then once you start to notice, you can kind of start to narrow down which of these potential people who have this problem that I see also sees that this is a problem.
• 6:50
  You know, if you're walking around with a hangnail, but you don't care about hangnails, then you're not going to buy a pair of nail clippers.
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  If you can screw in that screw in the wall with a butter knife, you're not going to reach for a screwdriver.
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  So it has to be something that a person is fed up with or they are sick of seeing that dream be, you know, just out of reach.
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  So it can be a desire.
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  It can be a problem that that is solvable.
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  And then having the willingness to set aside ego and say, you know what, I don't really have anything in what this ending solution looks like.
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  All I want to do is solve this problem for this client.
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  And the best way to do that is to get client input very, very early, especially before you actually build a product.
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  So that process is one of the most exciting times.
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  It's my favorite time to be involved in businesses.
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  And it's my favorite time to kind of support entrepreneurs is really around that kind of problem, ideation and understanding.
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  And I run an accelerator program.
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  And all of it is built for the early steps of entrepreneurship.
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  And so we ask folks to come in the room.
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  If they've been working on a business idea, fantastic.
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  We ask them to put it aside.
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  We want them to pitch a new problem that they've observed so they can really go through the process of practicing that problem identification, that solution building, the customer discovery process from scratch.
• 8:19
  And the nice thing about doing that with an idea you don't have kind of a lot of sunk costs into is that you're not super emotionally attached to it.
• 8:27
  And so you're all of a sudden going from, oh, I noticed this is a problem to talking to customers the next day.
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  And so there's no time for your ego to get involved.
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  There's no time for you to get so attached to a potential solution that you get blinded to a better solution for that problem.
• 8:44
  I have to tell you, one of the most interesting engagements with an entrepreneur that I've had in the, I don't know, 12 or 15 years I've been in this space was had an entrepreneur created a really incredibly innovative product.
• 9:00
  I mean, did all the homework.
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  I, you know, got some patents, some IP, you know, on the product created prototypes.
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  I mean, he really did all the right things.
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  I mean, if you had to say, man, follow this roadmap, this was it.
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  Right up until we went and made a pitch to an investor for potential funding.
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  And my investor, very generous gentleman, let the person make their whole presentation.
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  But when it was over, this is a true story.
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  When it was over, the investor said, I really think what you have here is a solution looking for a problem.
• 9:43
  I mean, and that's what I always stress to my students.
• 9:48
  You've really got to start with this problem.
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  You've got to start with a problem statement.
• 9:52
  Yeah.
• 9:52
  And if, like, to your point, if it's not a big enough deal to folks, then they're not going to pay any money to solve it.
• 9:59
  Yes.
• 9:59
  Yes.
• 10:00
  Two stories that echo that exactly.
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  I've got a little venture studio in the Founders Playground.
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  And we built a, you know, my sister and I saw this issue.
• 10:11
  We built a little bit of a prototype around it.
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  And we've been doing customer discovery.
• 10:16
  And we cannot get anybody on the phone to talk to us about this.
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  And so that, like, I've enjoyed working with my developers.
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  They're all students.
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  They come, you know, most of them are in rural Alabama.
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  And so it's awesome to me that I'm creating jobs.
• 10:30
  You know, that's mostly, you know, I wanted to stretch my managerial skills.
• 10:34
  Right.
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  And it's cheaper to hire high school students and practice managing them than to get an MBA.
• 10:38
  So I'm having fun doing that.
• 10:41
  But we can't get anybody on the phone.
• 10:44
  And that says to me, this isn't a big enough problem to solve.
• 10:47
  And so you hear a lot of talk these days about founder market fit.
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  And if the founder doesn't have access to that target market,
• 10:55
  then it's not a solution that you can solve.
• 10:58
  The world might need that.
• 11:00
  But you need to partner with folks.
• 11:02
  You need to leverage access that you have to get access if you don't already.
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  And if you don't have access to that market,
• 11:09
  pick a different problem to solve because the world is full of problems.
• 11:12
  Right.
• 11:13
  So that's one.
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  And then the second one is I'm actually an angel investor in a company.
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  And I've done a little bit of work with them in the past.
• 11:21
  I've been watching their company grow.
• 11:22
  And when they said they were raising a friends and family round, I was like, I'm in.
• 11:29
  You know, and it's because they had traction.
• 11:31
  They had customers that were co-building the product with them.
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  And I was excited to see, you know, how just how engaged their customers were.
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  And so that that is a problem that is looking that is a problem that's looking for a solution.
• 11:45
  Right.
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  And so I do something very similar when I'm training entrepreneurs and I ask them to describe the problem they're solving.
• 11:52
  Oftentimes that first iteration, it's, oh, I'm I have this problem.
• 11:57
  And if you're experiencing a problem that you're trying to solve, fantastic.
• 12:01
  You have you have a lot of insight and you most likely already know a lot of other people that have that problem.
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  You need to change how you're thinking about it, though, because you hopefully will not have that problem forever.
• 12:11
  But somebody needs to in order for you to continue selling.
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  So you need to change that language to my customers problem.
• 12:18
  Right.
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  And, you know, you touch on, I think, an excellent issue, too, is using investment as a filter.
• 12:27
  If nobody's willing to invest in this idea, that's a message to you.
• 12:32
  Yeah.
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  And it doesn't have to be a lot.
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  Could be crowdfunding, could be Kickstarter, could be, you know.
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  But if you're not getting any traction with the investment, you may need to say, maybe I don't have a great solution here.
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  Or maybe I'm not addressing a real need or a problem.
• 12:50
  Yeah.
• 12:50
  If somebody is not even willing to give you 15 minutes of their time, you don't you don't have a product.
• 12:55
  You have a problem, but no product.
• 12:57
  Right.
• 12:57
  So what does a client engagement look like with the founders playground?
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  How does that look?
• 13:05
  Yeah.
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  So honestly, typically, Tom, I I vet them first for what other no or low cost resources are available.
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  So my first port of call is always do you have an SBDC advisor?
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  So, I mean, if you're listening to this, you probably do.
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  I just moved from Alabama to New Jersey.
• 13:22
  First thing I did was I set up my small business development center advisor relationship there.
• 13:27
  So I want to see who else are you working with?
• 13:30
  Are you maximizing or am I duplicating an effort that somebody else has tried to and you just what do you need?
• 13:36
  You know, because if somebody has already given you advice and you don't have time to implement it, that's where you bring in an implementation partner like myself.
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  Somebody who can come in and be a fractional, you know, marketing or operations leader.
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  I kind of specialize in operations.
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  And so the the process really is a relationship building one.
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  If you're if you work in an industry that I have experience or relationships in, if I'm familiar with the technology, the processes, the systems, then I'm going to come in and help you.
• 14:04
  And if not, then I refer you to somebody who has expertise, because if I can't get you to the results that you need to see an amount of time that you have, you know, with your runway and it's not a relationship that's going to work.
• 14:15
  And for a lot of folks, that means they go back to their SBDC advisor and put that advice that they've been getting into play until they hit that hundred thousand, two hundred fifty thousand mark.
• 14:26
  Okay.
• 14:27
  It is Catherine Zobre, who is a speaker here at the Small Business Success Summit.
• 14:36
  What is your topic?
• 14:37
  I'm talking about two things.
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  The first is AI using AI tools to price out jobs and give quotes in service businesses.
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  So we're going to use an example.
• 14:48
  Wow.
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  Very helpful topic.
• 14:50
  I love that.
• 14:51
  Yes.
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  It's something that I do and my co-presenter, Juliana Bolivar of the Alabama Small Business Development Center is also very experienced with.
• 14:59
  And then our other topic is on workforce development and using using the tools available to support businesses.
• 15:07
  So that's for the that's for the SBDC advisors in the room.
• 15:10
  But nice.
• 15:11
  Yep.
• 15:12
  Those are the two topics.
• 15:13
  Okay.
• 15:13
  Catherine Zobre, the founders playground.
• 15:18
  Catherine, how does one find you in the founders playground?
• 15:21
  founders playground.co and I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram.
• 15:24
  All right.
• 15:25
  Very nice.
• 15:26
  Catherine, thank you for your support of the 2026 Small Business Success Summit.
• 15:31
  Thank you for your support of the SBDC and your support of, I guess, the nation's small business community.
• 15:40
  Because you're in New Jersey.
• 15:41
  I am indeed.
• 15:42
  Nice.
• 15:43
  Thank you.
• 15:44
  Thanks very much.
• 15:45
  Pleasure.
• 15:46
  Absolutely.
• 15:46
  This is Small Biz Florida.
• 15:49
  I am Tom Kindred, your host.
• 15:50
  It is all about small business and entrepreneurship here in Florida at the 2026 Small Business Success Summit.
• 15:57
  All taking place here at the beautiful Sunseeker Resort in Charlotte Harbor.
• 16:01
  Stay tuned.
• 16:02
  More to come.
• 16:03
  This is Small Biz Florida.
• 16:05
  That's all for this episode of Small Biz Florida.
• 16:08
  We hope you found valuable insights and inspiration to fuel your entrepreneurial journey.
• 16:13
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• 16:19
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• 16:21
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• 16:23
  So follow us for exclusive content and connect with fellow Florida small business owners.
• 16:28
  And for even more resources and support, visit our website at floridasbdc.org forward slash podcast.
• 16:35
  That's floridasbdc.org forward slash podcast.
• 16:40
  Until then, keep innovating and keep growing.
• 16:42
  Thanks for listening.
• 16:44
  We'll see you next time.