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Finding Your Own Definition of Success with Erika Biddix · We Built This Brand

• Erika: It truly is a space where women can come together in a, in a safe environment and ask the hard questions. What may be deemed an embarrassing question, celebrate outwardly something that happened that maybe they're not ready to get on Facebook. Chris Hill: Welcome to We Build This Brand. I'm your host, Chris Hill. And today I'm talking to Erica Bittix from OTT. She's the founder and she created the company with a focus on developing a community for female entrepreneurs. Erica is on a mission to change lives and local communities through female entrepreneurship. She's helping women redefine entrepreneurship, success, and boundaries for themselves, their businesses, and their families. And this was a great conversation with Erica. We talked about ODD, we talked about the brand she's built for women seeking professional community, and we also talked about what's next for the brand, what's next for what she's doing. And where she's going to grow the business in the coming years. Overall, I think you'll get a lot out of this conversation, even if you're not a female entrepreneur or seeking this kind of community, there's a lot of good wisdom and insight from her and her experience throughout this episode. So sit back, enjoy. Our conversation with Erika Bittex. All righty, well, welcome to We Built This Brand. Today, I am joined by Erika Bittex. Hello. Erika, thank you for joining me today. Erika: Absolutely. One of my favorite things to do is to talk about what we do at OTT, so. Chris Hill: Yeah. Where I like to start normally is just to get a little bit of backstory on you, talk about where you came from and what brAught you to the point of creating OTT. So, take me through that. Like, where has your journey led you? Erika: I was born on a, just kidding. Chris Hill: Maybe not that far back. Erika: So actually, I will go a little far back into high school. I just was always a kid who got good grades without much effort and was just constantly told I was going to do something right, which is great in theory, but also it tends to weigh on you a little bit. And so I spent a lot of my life, my young life, trying to figure out what was this thing I was going to do. And it was always in the back of my mind. So I took the you know, normal steps of college and job and marriage and kids. But at no point in there did anything ever become this great thing that I was going to do. And I remember my first job, I was traveling college campuses and they had the AIDS quilt there. And I remember looking at it and being like, man, somebody had this idea and took it from this little thing to suddenly where I can be anywhere in the United States. States and see this super impactful piece. And I just from, I remember standing in that room and thinking, what the hell am I gonna do? , . Like, I'm, you know, what is this thing I'm gonna do? And so it was just always rolling around in the back of my mind. Um, I became a corporate meeting planner. I ended up doing that for 20. Plus 20 ish something years, um, started my own company after we, uh, had a sojourn to Canada for a semester. And it just, life was just happening. I went to, um, a conference for meeting planners and a woman named Jade Simmons, uh, stood on stage and she said these words out loud, um, to everyone in the room, but mostly to me. to me, even though she didn't know it, that changed the whole trajectory. And she said, your purpose is what happens to others when you do what you do. And my brain exploded and I was like, hot damn, that is, that's what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to help other people with their purpose. I'm not going to do some great thing. I'm going to help other women. Do their great thing. And it's not hyperbole to say that in that moment, the idea for what all has become happened in my brain. We initially started as co working for female entrepreneurs. And, um, that's what happened in that moment. I had been looking for an office because I was working out of my house with my own business. I didn't have community. I didn't, you know, I just felt like disconnected and I couldn't find what I wanted. And so that story mixed with what Jade said turned into, I'm going to open up coworking space for female entrepreneurs so that we have this community where we can support the work that they're doing. Chris Hill: That's really cool. So you had this idea for OTT. When did the name come about? It's a very interesting name. Erika: Yeah, so we initially were called Girlboss Offices. Okay. Because we opened solely as a, it was just going to be co working space, just for 12 women, and it was going to run itself. And my husband tells me that that will be on my gravestone. Like, it was going to run itself. Because we very quickly recognized after opening that community was a lot bigger than just the co working piece. There's a lot of backstory there, but the short version of it is we opened December 1st, 2019. Obviously, an in person co working space, not ideal, four ish months later. My father was fighting a cancer battle at the time. It was just, it was a lot. I mean, pandemic, COVID. Dad, all the things. When my father passed away, I came back home, had a letter in the mail from some folks who own a certain hashtag that was a cease and desist letter for our business name. I had to decide pretty quickly if we were going to keep Girlboss Offices as our name, knowing that we likely were going to grow and they weren't going to let us do that. So I spent about two weeks crying and then it just one day clicked that, okay, we're going to. Do away with the brand. So I have a degree in advertising. Marketing is in my blood. I worked in advertising for a while and I really loved our name and I really loved our logo and I really loved our colors and I've had a hard time giving that up. Now, you know, four ish years later, I think, you know, hindsight, I recognize that a brand is not just what it looks like. So we gave it up and we knew we wanted something that was trademarkable. So that it wouldn't happen again. And the only way you can do trademarkable words, not the only way, the easy way to do it, is to make up a word, which my brain cannot do. We tried. I kept, I was like, that's not a word. They're like, we know we're making up words. I'm like, I don't care. It's not a word. Or you can utilize an archaic word, which are words that are maybe no longer utilized. So they're likely not in the dictionary anymore, etc. So we pulled that list out, picked four of them, Aught was the first one alphabetically, and we just liked the way it looked, so once we picked a few words, we liked the way they looked. We looked at the dictionary to see what they meant, looked at the definitions, and the definition of Aught is anything, the first definition is anything, and the second definition is at all. And, true story, when we looked at it, we thought it said anything at all. It doesn't. It actually means zero or nothing. Hmm. Because. It was an archaic word and we could, we decided to redefine it and we trademarked the word. So for us, the word Aught means anything at all. Um, and that's, that's how we landed on this brand. Chris Hill: That is so cool. That is so cool. And it's, it's hard to give up a brand when you love it. I Erika: know. Chris Hill: Yeah. It was so Erika: cute. But Chris Hill: you also had the opportunity, it is, but you also had the opportunity to reposition yourself because you were kind of tagging along with something else that was already positioned in the market. Now you have a chance to say, we're something new, something different. Erika: It was. And honestly, if you look at, um, so the hashtag is Girlboss and there's a long history with Sophia's brand of Girlboss. She no longer owns the brand or, or the hashtag. In the last few years, that particular phrasing has not had the best PR. Let's put it that way. So when you look back on it, hitching our brand to something, a colloquialism, honestly, hitching our brand to that meant that we didn't have. Complete control of it. Whereas when it's a word most people have never heard of or think is a different word or don't know how to pronounce it, it gives us the ability to tell the story of our brand from the get go with no, no preconceived notions. Yeah. Chris Hill: Yeah. That's nice. That's nice. So once you've, once you've transformed the name and you've got that going, how, how did you survive the pandemic? Erika: And by that, by our fingernails, I'm not really, I'm not really sure. It. Everything coincided so well. So the piece I didn't tell is yes, we had to change our name, but it also coincided with recognizing that what we were offering was more than co working. And so it wasn't going to be co working that was just going to run itself. It really was cultivating a community. And the way we survived the pandemic is we had a small but mighty social platform at that point. And we utilized it to talk about women in Knoxville specifically, who were doing things to survive the pandemic themselves. So I always talk about hard Knox pizza. Right now we think it's totally normal to order our groceries and pull up and get them put in the car or pick up food. It was not normal. At the beginning of the pandemic, if you think back to it, so Hard Knocks was one of the very first that wanted to keep their employees employed. And they did that by offering this carryout. methodology, you know, on the, on the side, on the sidewalk. So we utilized our social platform to help those women amplify what it was that they were doing. So when we came through that heaviest piece of the pandemic, we had established ourselves within the community here and recognized that it was a lot more than just 12 women. There are thousands of female entrepreneurs here in Knoxville, specifically, and On top of that, as we came out of it and we were showing that on social media, it was picking up traction outside of Knoxville in women saying, I'm looking for this type of community. So, we went through a name change, yes, but we also went through a full expansion. And we, we think of it as we started Girlboss Offices and we kind of set her ceiling right here as co working space. and then we With OTT, we thAught we did away with the ceiling in total, so we opened it up into multiple locations, we opened up for franchising, um, we did a mastermind group, but in the last year we've even seen that that was a ceiling also, so we just continue to raise the ceiling, hope that we're breaking it in total, but just allowing thAught in who she is to become what it is that women need and how she can support them. Chris Hill: That's really cool. So what was the moment like, you, you mentioned like there's a lot that went on during this timeframe in the transition, but what was the moment where you were like, oh, I know that I, this is a valid business. It's not gonna fail, it's not gonna be on my tombstone. , . Erika: Um, I don't know that I can say that yet. Chris Hill: Okay. Erika: We are only five years in. Yeah. And honestly. For a business to have longevity, you're looking at the 10 year mark, right? And my purpose, while I understand it is to help others, I've also started to understand how it can be utilized to help fix some of the issues that face female entrepreneurs specifically, one of which is funding. It's a lack of access to funding. Um, it's a lack of people who want to put money into a thingamajig that does not exist yet, and community is certainly a You know, we fall into that, into that category. So we are a bootstrapped business. My husband and I have, have made it happen up to this point. And we're, you know, we're as, uh, what's the word? Chris Hill: You're bootstrapped. Erika: Yeah. I mean, we're bootstrapped, but we certainly are as. Subject to finances, purpose based business are as subject to finances as any other business, and oftentimes more so, because, again, people are, we're trying to change the world. And when you do that, it's, With something people don't recognize, you know, um, is something that's already existed. So I don't, we have not hit the financial piece yet where I can be like, Oh yeah, this is, this is a thing. What I can tell you is our brand and the name Aught and what we stand for in our beliefs, those are firmly entrenched. And I know that. when people reference the way that we do, not the way we do business, but the way that we teach women to run their businesses. So we work on what we call the aught model of success. It's based on my personal experience of having my meeting planning company overnight go to seven figures, while at the same time trying to run this business. Spectacular crash and burn, but if you look at it solely through the lens of what success looks like, For the world, bigger, better, more. That meetings business was doing great, but at the end of the day, I was crying on the floor, my family was suffering, and frankly, the business itself was unsustainable in the way that we had built it. We now, I exited out of that, I exited out of that business because of this OTT model. So, I believe, Anything at all means that you can define success for yourself and that women who are business owners have the responsibility to do that. Because at the end of the day, the reason my first business for me crashed and burned was because I had not defined success. So I was always, always chasing it. So we've got this very specific model that we utilize, which are aspirations and boundaries. But then we talk about it in silos. I normally have three coffee cups. So there's two. Yeah. So here's two. There's the you silo, which is you. With no responsibilities, people, pets, plants, clients, whatever. So looking at what your aspirations and your boundaries are for you as a human, without any repercussions, right? It doesn't mean you're going to go with those, but let's think about it. If you don't have to worry about your kids or your spouse or whatever, what do you really, really want? Right? And what are, what are your like, real, real boundaries? Then you've got the middle, which is your business. And this is hardest for business owners, specifically women, which is that you, that's not you. Like this, this here, this is aught. She is separate from me. And the responsibility is to the business, not to myself. So oftentimes we'll make decisions as business owners, and we're constantly thinking, how does this impact my family? I don't want to do that. And that's not healthy for the business to think about things like that. So we talk about, Looking at that as a separate entity. And we talked about your family. So you as you by yourself, your business has nothing to do with you. And then your family is something that you are a part of. And again, women have a hard time with that because oftentimes we're doing for others without considering ourselves as part of it. And what we find is when you've got those three silos and you look at them individually. It's much easier to see where there's positive overlap, as opposed to when it's all in one big mess. It's just a whole lot of but, but, but, can't, can't, can't, can't, can't, right? So, that was a very long answer to how do I, how do I know that we've like, land it, and it's when I talk to women, and they talk about, I thought about it in this silo, and I thought about it in this silo, and I looked at it against the aspirations and the boundaries, and that's why I made the choice that I made. And a very real example of that is we talk about bakers, right? So they're, you want to make cookies, you want to sell cookies. And so if your, if your aspiration is to make a million dollars a month, but your boundary is you're only going to bake for two hours, I guess it better be some real good cookies and you better be charging a whole lot of money for them. Right? So it's not about. It's not about work life balance or whatever. What it is about is alignment and working within those guardrails so that you're living a life that you enjoy and your work can support your life instead of your life supporting your work, which is how, you know, it works. Our general society has it set up. Chris Hill: Yeah, that's really cool. So the validation then for you is within the model that you've built and being able to see what you've designed to actually help people. Erika: Actually, yeah, and not just help people, but watching them implement it on their own. As a, as a business coach, you know, people say, you know, people will tell you a story. And so one of the women will be like, well, I was, I have a question about, nevermind, I know the answer. If I look at my, I look at my boundaries, you know. So we've got buttons that say, I'm the boss. And it's because a lot of times in corporate, not a lot of, most of the time in corporate work, someone's, you always are having to get permission, right? You have to, is this email okay to send? Can I give this offer to the client? Can I, can I, can I? And so you become an entrepreneur and you're suddenly like, where is the adult? Like who, where do I get permission? Who says yes? You know, who says yes to me? And the reality is you're, you're the boss, right? So if you're going to decide to change your brand colors, there's nobody who's going to give you permission for that. At the end of the day, you have to make, you have to make that choice. And I think it's that piece of personal responsibility that we oftentimes abdicate. In reality, we need to own that responsibility. That the responsibility of me not having any boundaries and crashing and burning falls on me. Nobody else did that, did that for me. Chris Hill: That's, that's really cool. So, so the model for your business then has really evolved from being, um, just an office space like we're in today. Oh, Erika: we're like, we're so far past that. Yeah. Um, so far, so far past that. So, Chris Hill: so tell me more about where you all are at now. Erika: From a brand perspective in Knoxville specifically, we are known as. as co working space. So we've got two offices here. We've got room for 12 women at our west office. We've got room for 16 here at our downtown office. And that tends to be our brand awareness here in Knoxville. Um, outside of Knoxville, we are known as a virtual community. We, we have a true virtual community where women worldwide can come together and we offer them business coaching. We do virtual co working. It truly is a space where women can come together in a safe environment and ask the hard questions, what may be deemed an embarrassing question, celebrate outwardly something that happened that maybe they're not ready to get on Facebook and yell about or, you know, people who don't know how to spell entrepreneurship, maybe don't even understand what they're excited about. So we've got that virtual community piece. And then we also do a lot of work with our model with teams. If you think about it, if you haven't had the conversation with yourself about what your aspirations and boundaries are, or what your business aspiration boundaries are, or if you're traditionally employed, what that looks like there too, we oftentimes get forgotten as humans in a work environment. So, we're out here running that model for a variety of entities. And then we also launched the permission slip conference with a colleague of mine in Minnesota, Sally, Sally Z. She's a speaker and a speaker coach. And so we've got this event that happens in Knoxville annually now where we bring women in who are either entrepreneurs or traditionally employed. And we are. Not only talk with them about what permission is, we talk about how permission has to come from yourself to make these changes or big steps, even if it's steps backwards, you know, all of that is permission that you have to give yourself, but also you have the duty to give yourself the permission for these things. The world needs your ideas. So really and truly at the end of the day, OTT is here supporting women in community, generally entrepreneurs, and just doing what we can to support them so that they can have healthy, happy lives that they deserve and enjoy it at the same time. Chris Hill: That's really cool. That's really cool. So you've got, you've got that, you've got the consulting. What have been your favorite moments in the business so far? My favorite Erika: moments? Again, success tends to be defined by bigger, better, more for so, for so many people. I love when our members can identify a when that is not tied specifically to bigger, better, or more. That they can tie it to what their definition of success is. So, we have one woman who said to me, Erica. I sat on the couch and I watched TV and I did not look at my phone for a few hours. And that is a major, major win for me. Um, and it is a major win for her. It's success for her because she's always worked and she doesn't know how to not work. So for her to see that as success and celebrate that is, is fantastic. At the same time, we always say, if you want to sell 12 dozen cookies or you want to have a brick and mortar in every mall in America, we will support you in whichever one of those things. We're not. We're not here to pick what is successful for you. Um, and if you say you only want to sell 12 and you want to be with your kids all day, every day, then if you tell us you have a brick and mortar in every mall, we're going to be like, wait a minute, that's not. It's fine if you want to change your mind, but we want to hold you to these guardrails. So, and sometimes that is financial. And we've got a woman who, uh, in the last week has booked as much business in the last week as she booked in all of 2023. So, she's taken this business that she wasn't sure if she could financially support her family with it, if she should return to traditional employment, et cetera. And by utilizing. Our model specifically, by being in our community and getting support from those women, she has now made that financial success goal for herself. That's awesome. It's pretty amazing. We do a lot of dancing around here. We do a lot of, um, we do a lot of yay! You know, just the fact that we know these women, we know their stories. And we know them as humans. We know who their families are. If it's a, you know, a nuclear family, or we know if their family is who they spend every Saturday with. We know that when they hit these moments of success, we know how it's impacting everything else. Just, I, I get goosebumps daily. I literally just got them. And that's how, that's kind of how I judge it is if I've had a goosebump Chris Hill: moment. Yeah. So what does your success look like for you? Erika: Yeah. So for me, we've got three kiddos. Um, they're getting older, as I told you before we got on camera. I became an entrepreneur. I started my meeting planning business because as an employee, I missed first steps. I worked through my grandfather's funeral. I did a lot that impacted my family, both my nuclear and my extended family. Not in a great way. So I became an entrepreneur so that I could be the kind of mom I wanted to be. We went through a lot of fertility issues to have the kids, you know, like we just, I want it to be a mom. I want it to be a successful employee, but I also want it to be a successful mom. And the position I found myself in was not allowing me to do those things. For me, success was being able to have my own travel schedule. Uh, and I had that. But also, because I didn't have the boundaries, what I found was I, it didn't take very long to get into the old habits. Gotcha. That's when I say you've got your own responsibility with it, right? So, for a long time, I could blame it on being employed. Then, at the end of the day, when I was in charge, it was still kind of the same situation. So, for me, when I look at my model of what, you know, My aspirations are for success. It's being able to be at my kids stuff. And I realize that is not, you know, a smart goal, but at the end of the day, I know, yeah, but it's not measurable. So we talk about that with women that we know if we feel good about something. And so I encourage them to set goals that are, that may not have numbers associated with them. So one of my goals is happy to get out of bed and go to work in the morning. Great. That is successful for me because it. With my other, my other gig, I used to cry every time an email came in. That didn't feel good, you know? So, I know that that's success for me, is, is feeling that. I know that being able to, um, prioritize my kids and ask to reschedule a podcast because we've got a tennis match today, that is success for me. It's being able to go on vacation and checking my email because I want to, not because I feel like I need to. I have to, but because I am invested in the women that we're working with and wanting to know what's happening with them, et cetera. Um, Anna, who is our ops manager will be like, you don't have to take care of this. And I'm like, I, I totally understand that. I, this is something I want, I want to be taken care of. So I feel very much right now, like success for me is the ability to maintain joy and what it is that I'm doing and putting my family first as I'm able to. The reality of business ownership is you can't. Always do that. Um, and a couple weeks ago, actually, I had to make a choice to not go on spring break with my family because we were having some pretty significant internet issues and I'm the only one on the account and I had to handle it, right? So, did making that decision fit within my model? It did not. However, I knew that that decision felt terrible. I knew it was the right decision for the business, but it didn't feel good. And five years ago, it would have been like, you know, tough. It is like, I would never, my feelings would never have even come into it. It would have just been like, okay, it is what it is. Sorry. But you know, here it is. For me to have the feeling of like, this feels not good. That was success because I was recognizing that I wasn't just my business. I was also who I was as a human and also who I was as a mom in that moment too. Chris Hill: It's a more holistic approach as opposed to putting your identity fully into work and then, oh, I happen to be these other things. And I happen to be these other, Erika: yeah. And I'm, I'm super good at compartmentalizing like gold medal and the compartmentalizing piece. And that. Really doesn't serve you well in the long term. It serves you well in the short term. I got too good at it with my first, my first business. So I love that the compartmentalizing doesn't happen as naturally or as often as it used to. I have, I get, I get to make the choice. I'm the boss if I want to compartmentalize at that Chris Hill: moment. That's fantastic. Yeah. So what does the future of OTT look like? Erika: I have recently come to the understanding that we are not just here for female entrepreneurs, but we are here for cultural change, that we are pushing frameworks and boundaries that have always existed out of the way and helping people to redefine those, rebuild them. But not for everyone writ large, that it's, it is different for a lot of people. When I think about what I want it to look like, what I want it to look like is I want every woman to understand that anything at all is possible for them, however it is that they define that. But I also want the rest of the world to to understand that and support it as well. So I don't know what that looks like, you know, logistically, but I just, I think the pandemic did so many things for so many people. At the end of it, if there could be a silver lining to something so terrible, I It is, a piece of it is women recognizing that they don't, they don't have to be held to the frameworks and the boundaries. I mean, good gravy, they canceled the Olympics. So like, what else, what other proof do we need that things, that things can get, can get changed? When I think about my big goals, it's being able to tell this story on the Today Show, so that it can reach more people. It's not that, I think our, our story, I want our story to be on the Today Show. It's that I want this, this story and this understanding to be amplified as far and wide as humanly possible. Chris Hill: I mean, I think what you're doing is very applicable to men as well as women. Erika: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. We've got We've got sons, um, and, and they, you know, A, they can spell patriarchy and B, they know what it means. They know what it means. And it's not, we don't use patriarchy. We don't mean it as this negative word. I mean, obviously it can be utilized that way, but they understand that what it means is that a certain framework was developed. We talk about how chairs were developed for what a man's backside is and not a woman's backside. So that's why we get a little bit more uncomfortable in them and long, long, long, long, long, Long term periods, you know, but we talk about it as it's a framework on which everything has been expected to be built and that that framework doesn't work for a whole lot of people. Um, and so for my kids to be able to understand that means that the message is getting, is getting passed down. And so hopefully what that means is positive change. Moving forward. So yes, it's a hundred percent applicable. There are a lot of people who do a lot of work for a lot of different portions of society. My particular and aughts particular lane is female entrepreneurs, but hopefully the trickle, the ripple effect rather of that. We'll hit elsewhere. Chris Hill: Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you. Well, last question before we go. Okay. This is a fun one. Talk to me. I always like to ask. This is a branding focused podcast, of course. So I always have to ask, what is your favorite brand right now? Erika: Favorite brand right now. Okay. So I'm going to say locally and not right now because it has been historically. I love, I love the Cruz Dairy Farm brand. I love, I love that story. I love any brand that has a story. Um, so when people come to Knoxville, and I take them places, by about the third place, they're like, great, what's the story? Because I can't just, like, take them to cruise and not tell them the story of Colleen, but so I love their branding. I think it, The fact that you have Cruise Farm as a Halloween costume here, that like three or four people kids will show up, you know, at your doorstep now, I think that's just so pervasive, um, in Knoxville. So I love that. Um, the one that makes me laugh the hardest right now is Loomy. So it's a lotion, uh, that is a lotion deodorant that can be used on various parts of your body. Oh, yeah. And their branding is so out of, so not what we're used to on TV or on the radio that you're like, what did they just, what did they just say? So it breaks through the noise so well. And it makes me laugh at the same, at the same time. So I love that they've leaned in just on something that is not, comfortable for them. There's a lot of toilet paper ads that are doing that right now too, but I don't think they're doing it super successfully. I think it's just kind of like, Oh, that's uncomfortable. But Lumi has added this humor element to it that I've really appreciated. Chris Hill: That's cool. That's cool. I'll have to go. I guess I'll have to go look them up. You should, you should. Yeah. I always love you to bring them with a sense of humor. Always makes me happy. That's really cool. Well, Erica, where can people connect with you? Where can they find out more about OTT? Maybe even get involved in the community? Erika: Yeah, absolutely. So everything that we do is under the header We Are OTT. OTT is A U G H T. So our website is weareott. com. All of our social handles are weareott. And so you can find us there. You can get involved with the community. It's super easy. It's a monthly recurring monthly thing. Membership. So, there's a place on the website you can join right there. And then, Permission Slip Conference is coming up in November. Chris Hill: Okay. Erika: Tickets are on sale for that. Folks can purchase that at permissionslipconference. com. And then, if you're, if you're local to Knoxville, we'd love to have anybody for co working. So, again, everything's on the website. Chris Hill: Excellent. And this is a great space for co working. Erika: Uh, we love it. Chris Hill: Well, Erika, thank you so much for joining me today. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. All right.