“I Built a Multi-Million Dollar Business—and Then Got Fired” w/ Mary Seats ' Mz Skittlez"

SCS (Intro):

Pull up and listen. Ladies and gents, in this week's episode, we dive into the incredible journey of Mz Skittlez, also known as Mary Seats, a powerhouse entrepreneur who turned $300 into a multimillion dollar fashion brand, Cupcake Mafia. And yes, she was a rapper to start. A rapper from Atlanta – this may not sound like your typical venture story, and that's because it isn't.

But boy, is this one worth tuning into. From building a multimillion business to being fired from her very own company. Mary's journey is not just one of resilience, but a testament to why we should be investing in women just like her. This is a masterclass in resilience, ambition and billion dollar moves for anyone ready to break boundaries in business.

And as I challenge you to break your patterns of success and investments, buckle up.

SCS: 

We're gonna start with rapid fire. So, billion dollar questions to get to know the woman behind the multi-million empire. 

Mary Seats: 

Okay. 

SCS: 

First of all, what is something people don't know about you that they'd have to see it to believe it?

Mary Seats: 

I think people don't know that I… maybe that I can't cook. 

SCS: 

You can't cook? 

Mary Seats: 

No. 

SCS: 

And you call it your company Cupcake Mafia? In the bakery. In the bakery? 

Mary Seats: 

And I don't know how to bake. So when I put it on my stories, now that I have a six year old, they're all like laughing about my cakes. Just give me a year. I'll be good. 

SCS: 

All right. Well, the other one, maybe that people don't know is that you're actually an introvert, right? 

Mary Seats: 

Yeah. I was going to  say that too. But I feel like. Because I have this alter ego, when I'm out and about, most people won't know that. You will only get to know that when you get to know me and you see the preparation that I have before I have to go into an event.

So yes, I struggle with a little bit of social anxiety and I'm also an introvert. 

SCS: 

So, Miss Skittles, we have to start there.You know, what's, what's skittles? What does this mean? Do you like skittles? 

Mary Seats: 

I actually love skittles, but it came because when I was growing up, I didn't have a lot of money.

So I was interning at a local hair shop. And at the end of that month, they were going to give you free hair. I was young. I didn't ask any questions. But at the end of the month, they were like, here's the box of hair you can choose from. It was all colorful braiding hair.

So I kind of just made it my thing because I didn't have money and I wanted to get out the house anyways. So I just started braiding my hair and like orange and black and like all these different colors. And so then a tragic incident happened where I lost my best friend in ninth grade and I was speaking in front of the whole school. 

And this guy made a joke, “sit down, you look like a skittle”. And so the whole school started to call me skittles. And then I go on two years later to get a record deal because I was in the music industry. And then my manager is like, hey, we need a nickname for you. I don't have a nickname He's like, okay. Well, you can't be Mary because of Mary J. Blige like you can't be… no one ever called you anything I'm like in school. They tease me and call me skittles. 

He was like, that's perfect. You have a bright personality so you can be skittles and so I went on to be a music artist called Skittlez and I love that it's still like there's still a part of me that I'm like, Oh my God, why this name?

It's kind of followed me. And even when I was young and in college, before Obama was president, I was able to meet him and the whole school had already told him like, “oh, if you want to bring influence to your campaign in Cleveland, you have to connect with Skittlez”. So when I met him, and I'm like, hi, my name is Mary.

He's like, are you Skittles? I'm like, it's the future president. 

SCS: 

Well, if Barack Obama has said those words, You have to stick with it. 

Mary Seats: 

Exactly. So I think I can't run from it now. 

SCS: 

I love it. Well, that's turning fuel to fire as well. I mean, you were teased and then guess what? Who's laughing now? 

All right. So fill in the blank. Success is? 

Mary Seats: 

Success is legacy. 

SCS: 

Failure is? 

Mary Seats: 

Failure is a chance to do it over again. 

SCS: 

What's your most used app on your phone right now? 

Mary Seats:  

Instagram, for sure. Outside of Instagram would be ManiChat. 

SCS: 

Pardon? Manichat. Oh, Manichat. Of course. What has aged you the most?

Mary Seats: 

Employees. 

SCS: 

Ah! Okay. A moment you feel like, you felt like you were giving up? 

Mary Seats: 

Oh my God, that's definitely the air bed story of when I built my first company from $300 and scaled it to $4 million. And then I partnered with the investment firm, which is kind of called a distribution firm when it comes to retail.

And within six months, they fired me from my own company and it left me on an air bed above my retail store that I had bought out of a deal to save those three employees that were working for me.

That's the moment where I thought to give up because I felt like there was no handbook. There is no book that says hey if you're a female founder, this is what you do if you sign a bad deal. When you googled at that time, when I googled a person that had been fired from their company, the only story that came up with Steve Jobs. I can't just pick up the call and be like, hey, can you coach me on you know, so that was the lowest part.

I mean, you are talking to your family and friends and they have no advice for you. It is the loneliest time. It's the loneliest I've ever been in my life when you are, when you are just the only one that has went through this and there's no one to say, like, take this medicine, do it again…

But what I will tell you came out of that is. One day, one of my friends who also exited her company, Boss Babe, I called her, Hey, I need you to look over my resume. Like, I don't have that much job experience, but I need you to look over my resume cause I'm going to get a night job to pay for my employees to keep my store open.

And she was like, no, if you built a $1 million business, build another one using those same skills, get on Periscope, talk about what you're doing, share your story. From there, everything catapulted. I built a community, which is called GirlMob now. We have thousands of members from all over the world, minority women that are learning how to start growing scale businesses.

I wrote out the Bakery Coworks blueprint. I started a marketing agency. In the darkest time, I was able to still find the light. 

SCS: 

Yeah. So what a great segue. I mean, we're diving right into it. Take a step back here. The year was 2015. You had an idea to be making shirts, and you were getting huge orders, including from Forever21, and you didn't even know what distribution looked like, all of that.

Bring us back to that moment, and then, uh, what made you, I guess, invite investors in, and then turn this into a bad news story, unfortunately. 

Mary Seats: 

Absolutely. So, I can tell you the most crazy story. So we got our largest order, which was around $50,000 and we needed to ship it within a certain window.

It was for a store called DTLR. So we're at our warehouse, we're at our storage unit, AKA our warehouse, and we're waiting for FedEx to arrive and wait, they're late.

They usually come at 12 noon and this has to be scanned by 5 PM. And so I'm freaking out. I'm freaking out. I call a semi truck company, like not a big semi truck, definitely a truck that was bigger than I knew how to drive. 

I got in this truck, like this semi semi truck, like a half of a semi truck. My staff is in the back with the boxes and we are hauling it to FedEx, like to not lose this order because they paid me up front, they went on those terms.

So I'm hauling it. My staff is flying around the back in with the boxes and we get to FedEx. They're like, we're about to close. I'm like, absolutely not. I will pay every single person a hundred dollars to make sure all of the packages get scanned. And they're like, okay, no problem. So we're hauling them off in a conveyor belt style, and we get them there.

And at the end of the night, I'm like crying in my bed, like I can't go on doing this. Like, what if this order was a hundred thousand? What if this order was 300, 000? How do I produce something when I'm using a local manufacturer and I don't even have the manpower to really do this. And so if one little piece breaks, which was FedEx not arriving, now I’m at  $50, 000, I can't do this, so that was like June, July.

August comes, we're at our trade show and Forever 21 walks up and they're like, we love this brand. This is brilliant. Like we want to do a collaboration. They wrote a $1.4 million purchase order. I'm like, wow, looking at it. I'm like blinking, is this real? Is this real? And they're like, yes, but we need it to ship for summer.

So I'm like freaking out. I don't know what to do. 

SCS: 

So how many… when was that? What month was that?

Mary Seats: 

So that was August but they want it to ship in summer, right? So I didn't have a lot of time to find an investor to send me to make sure all the tech packs were right, to do all the things.

So what I did, like literally with the PO, I walked around to my other friend's booth, Jeff Staple, the owner of Pink Dolphin… I walked around to the other streetwear brands that I know had investors. I have this PO, what do I do? And Jeff Staple was like, you have to find an investor. You have to find a distribution company.

He scribbled on paper, here's some names, call them up, let them know you got this big PO and then look up Daymond John’s story. So you can know the bad, but you can also, these are the people that know how to operate in China. These are the people that know how to get the product to America. You know, they know everything and they will back you.

And that's exactly what I did. I went and met with these companies. They were flying me out. They made it seem like a dream. Like they were like, we believe in you. We are going to, you'll have a store in Times Square. We'll be sending you around the world to travel for inspo.

It was a dream that I was going from eight employees to now a big company with 180 employees that all believed in my dream and that obviously was not it. And so what I do remember most is that. At this time, my husband now, he was my boyfriend then, he was like, you have to get your lawyer involved.

And so I'm calling my lawyer, I'm calling my lawyer. And August and February are the biggest times to sell brands. So the lawyers that are in the retail space are so busy. And I was kind of asking him to make crazy moves for me. He's like, I can't do it. Be patient. Please be patient. I'm like I can't and so I told them I was like, you know what, I'll allow you guys to hire a lawyer for me. 

And so I allowed them to hire a lawyer for me and In that meeting that dinner that I have with the lawyer. He was like, what would you do if this all went wrong? And I was like, it's not going to go wrong. Like I know me as a founder. I also know that if by the end, if this all goes wrong in three years, five years, I would have had made so much money that I am so innovative that I could easily start something else.

I didn't think that it would have went wrong in six months. Yeah. By the time that I got into the company, they were firing CEOs from other brands that had tripled their revenue. So it already was a gloomy, dark pathway ahead when I'm seeing CEOs that I'm like looked up to that are now being fired from their companies and like, obviously, they're not telling me all the back end, but they're like, good luck, girl, you know. 

Within six months, they called me into the office, we were having a whole spat about whether I wanted to sell my brand to off price retailers and I didn't. And so I wanted this brand to be a brand that grew, I didn't want to drop it in an off price like a TJ Maxx or a Marshalls. I felt like we could create a brand for those off price retailers and they didn't want to do that. They were like, no, you're gonna lose money and we don't want to do that.

We want to sell your brand to off price. We want to sell your brand to all the sneaker stores and to the high end stores. Women don't shop like that, you know? One day they asked me to come into the office. They were like, you pack up your suitcase. We're going to send you to Atlanta for a trade show.

And I'm like, okay, great. I like brought my little dog in, have my suitcase ready. And then I started to see all the board walk into the main seat, the main owner's office. I've seen this too many times with other CEOs and like, heart dropped down, pit of my stomach. I tried to go in my showroom, my fingerprint won't work.

Tried to log into my email, won't work. And I literally text my boyfriend, I'm like, today is the day. He's like, what? I walked into the office, they say, we no longer need you a part of Cupcake Mafia. I'm like, yeah, but you can't do that because I own the company. 

They pull out this binder and they're like, Actually, you're an employee of a holding company that we own and you're a B member on the board and A members have voting rights. So we are all A members. You have now been voted off and you no longer own this company. 

And I went to Helen Hardy, I was in New York, I went to Helen Hardy, a soup shop, and I just cried my eyes out. And I was like, what do I do? I have no real work history. I've always been in the music industry. I had no path even though I had a degree. I had no path to say, okay, I'll be a marketer, I'll be a this, I'll be a that. All of my eggs was in that one basket. So I honestly didn't know what to do. 

I called my boyfriend. He said, you know what, come back to Atlanta. We'll figure it out. I took that flight to Atlanta, Airbnb'd my apartment in New York and started my journey over and It was the worst and best thing that ever happened to me.

SCS:

I mean so many… first of all, sorry that you went through that. But you know, this is not uncommon. I've heard this many times from a lot of my own friends because they were not familiar with private equity, but that is their very model, right, especially in D2C, where they essentially acquire and then for some of them, they're not interested in the growth of the company, they're looking to Squash competitors or actually merge and, you know, get it to the next place and have no interest really in having you lead the brand, although it was what made it successful.

So taking a step back, it's been yours since then. And of course, you've, as they say, you have risen from the ashes and used all that fuel to fire you up. What would you say are your top three lessons that you take from that situation? Advising someone, you know, a younger Mz Skittlez that was so excited about this deal, like a huge investor.

What would you say to a founder tuning in? 

Mary Seats: 

Yeah, I would absolutely say your lawyer should be involved in everything. Like now I don't even go I can't…

SCS:

And hire your own lawyer, you can't have the same lawyer as the other party. 

Mary Seats: 

Absolutely, hire your own lawyer. Now there's so much AI out here like you can put a contract on ChatGPT and ‘tell me all the red flags of this contract’. If you don't have a lawyer, you can do something as simple as that. So that when you sit in front of a lawyer, you can say, hey, break this contract down in dummy terms. Explain this contract to a five year old. And that's what I needed. 

I needed to know that I was a B member. I thought that I was with them. I was giving money. I was investing in things with them. So I thought that I was on the same level as them, but that's not what the contract said. So the first thing is to hire your own lawyer. 

The second thing is if someone wants to invest in you or partner with you. Understand your value. I had already bootstrapped a business from $300 to $4 million.

And I had a $1.4 million purchase order, which means that more purchase orders were going to come. Whether it was from Forever21, Saxton Avenue, Neiman Marcus, more purchase orders were going to come. Our projection was at $7 million. We had a $7 million projection. So if I can go from $300, not no loans, no investors, no rich boyfriends, like no nothing, no credit, no capital.

Just $300 continuing to flip and flip there was some value that I owned as a founder and that value kind of went away as I continued to grow and scale the brand because I started to think I can't do this by myself. There's someone smarter than me. There's someone that has it all figured out and I need that person.

No, you may need a little bit of information. You may need backing. You may need financial capital, but you are so valuable in what you are building. So understand your value because you're only as good as what you negotiate. 

And so the third thing that I would say is really plan your exit. And make a roadmap from there. So with Cupcake Mafia, I never thought about getting fired from the brand. My personal brand was so infused in Cupcake Mafia. Like when you see me, you’ve seen the brand, you knew how some way that I was pushing and every buyer knew my number. Like it was so connected to me. So when the brand failed, I failed.

Instead of me planning, okay, I want this brand to grow. My personal brand is separated. I'm not going to mix them together. I'm not going to put all my eggs in one basket. I'll also be doing this over here to bring revenue to the business. I just planned. I want to grow a t- shirt company. I want to scale a t- shirt company and whatever I have to do. That's what I'm going to do. 

And so I think when you are thinking about your company. So now I have the largest female focus co working space called The Bakery and I've already thought like, okay, what is my end goal for The Bakery? How do I not make those same mistakes? How do I separate my personal brand so that when I sell, I'm not a liability to The Bakery, right?

And so I think that when you think about your end goal you, one, won't get caught up by the stop signs and the red lights that you get along the way, because if you know ‘I'm going to the bank to cash a $10,000 check’. You're not counting the stop signs. You're not counting the red lights. You're not counting the potholes or the times you run out of gas. Your end goal is like, I got to get to that bank. 

But in business. When you don't have an end goal, you start to think, oh my God, my bank account looks terrible. Let's just give up. Oh my God, the employees are not the… let's just give up.

You start to count all the stop signs and the red lights along the way, because you're forgetting that there is this huge angle that is not going to only impact you, your family, but the other people that are going to be inspired by your story. 

SCS: 

Love that! Skittles is dropping gems here. 

So I want to unpack that a little bit because I think this is super important. I love the metaphor of the red lights. And I don't know if you tuned into Matthew McConaughey's audiobook. I absolutely love it. But it's called green lights. 

And he talks about green lights in life that we don't often pay attention to. So question to you is, you know, business is so hard. So effing hard. Every day is a challenge, whether that's employees, a sudden politics, whatever you call it, right? 

How do you differentiate between a red light that you have to stop and turn the other way and pivot? Or that it's just another hurdle. What's your framework for that these days? 

Mary Seats: 

Yeah. So I think my framework is so my one quote that I live by is a slow rise to the top is better than a fast fall to the bottom. So when I think about my journey and my growth, I'm like the longest. Overnight success that you'll ever see. This is like a 10 year overnight success. 

I see all the media saying ‘she's an overnight success’. I'm like, what? Overnight, like 10 years of overnight success. Great. But I would say my framework is pivot professionally and successfully. How do you do that? 

Pivot. There are two things that I think about as a CEO. I think about what moves the cash register and I think about what moves my customer experience, right? So when a hurdle comes up, right? Say if a team member is about to quit. When this team member is about to quit, I'm thinking, how does this team member affect my customer experience? How does this team member affect the cash register?

And I'm going to create an opportunity for me to professionally pivot from this team member. This team member may be, for example, I always thought that I needed an in person executive assistant. I'm like, oh my God, they have to be with me. They have to hold my bag. They have to do this. They have to do that.

And once I lost my executive assistant or they decided to pivot and move into a new career path, I was like, oh my God, they've been with me for five years. How do I navigate someone learning me all over again? And I wrote down what affects my customer experience and what affects the cash register?

And the cash register or my finances was that this executive assistant is expensive. It's expensive. The flights, the hotels, all the things. And when I wrote down the line items of what they actually do for me. It could be virtual. And then I thought about how they affected my customer experience because they work with me every single day.

They have all of my clients numbers. My clients go to them. They're booking calls. They're doing this. They're doing that. There's so much communication in their phone that I no longer have access to. I don't know what they said to my last client because they're leaving. Oh, but what if a client reaches out to them that I didn't work with before?

So now, how do I make sure that that never happens again? I have a virtual assistant. We run through a system called go high level where I can see every text, every call, every calendar appointment, every email that was sent so that if I need to off board that executive assistant and onboard a new executive assistant, they can start.

Exactly where that executive assistant left off, they don't have to start and be like, well, who are these clients? And what, what did she say last and, oh my God, how was that communication with this client? It made better sense for me in the long run of my business. So how can you pivot professionally and successfully to extend the growth of your company?

SCS: 

I love it. And a lot of that sounds like planning optionality, by giving yourself options. Retaining some of that control, really, because it is your business, ultimately. So, you talked a little bit about The Bakery CoWork.

So, we want to go into that. This is your new venture. Of course, you're also dubbed the Kris Jenner of marketing. You own The Icing Agency and you worked with some big names, right? From those that have been on Shark Tank, Tamara Braxton, Shear Share, Spergo, tell us a little bit about these two worlds that you're in today.

What takes up most of your time? What is the vision here, that end goal you were talking about? 

Mary Seats: 

Absolutely. Currently we are working on developing a CEO for The Icing Agency. She is amazing. And so previously to opening the bakery, The Icing Agency was literally my full focus. We, all together, I have 28 employees.

So each of the businesses are running, they are thriving. We have leadership in all across the board and all of the companies. So now I'm just a overseer. And that is a purely a marketing agency 

SCS: 

Working with brands and all that.

Mary Seats: 

Yes, it's a full service marketing agency. So we do everything, its graphics, videography, photography, event development… Everything PR we do it all depending on what our clients need.

So we work with small businesses, large businesses, and personal brands. I've been running that company for nine years that actually started from the original company that I got fired from. So they wanted to sell me to an off price retailer, the off price retailer got word that I had got fired from my investment firm.

And they called me and said, we have a over a million dollar contract for a consultant, but you have to own a marketing agency. I don't have no marketing agency. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm trying to buy back my retail brand. And they were like, but you're the perfect person.

You have the vision. You have the connections. You have the relationships. You are perfect. And I'm like, sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. I have no idea how to do that. She's like, you have a marketing degree, and you are the person we need to hire. You are it. This will give you the money you need to buy your company back, you have to Friday to give me a marketing agency to get me a proposal. 

And that's what we did. And so since then, I've been growing, then scaling this marketing agency. And 2020, we did $16 million in revenue. From that, it's been an upward spiral. It's been an upward spiral, like the amount of clients that we've been able to manage, the cool things that we've been able to do recently, we helped a client whose event is this upcoming weekend. We're producing her full conference with special guests and a whole line of talent, musical performances and all the things.

Recently in 30 days, she's like, I want to release a book. So in 30 days, we helped her release her book, wrote the book, shot the cover photos, did all the marketing for the book. And then within 30 days, the book is out on Amazon. And in one day she made the Amazon bestseller list.

SCS: 

Amazing. So of course this sounds like the overnight success, but we know it's been 10 years in the making, 9 years for the icing agency, but a lot of that success - skills that have been built before. What do you think now that you're like a veteran right, in marketing and building brands?

What do brands today need to know in building an effective brand in being that personality? I mean, those are perhaps two different things as you talk about, you know, separation of brands there. What's your key tip from a marketing perspective here? 

Mary Seats: 

I think the key tip that I have is Value over price. A lot of people don't see the value in your brand and that's why they're worried or concerned about the price.

If people seen the value in your company, then they would have no issues with selling them at whatever price that you want to have. Right. We walk into Chanel and buy Chanel bags. The price has increased. 

SCS: 

Enormously. 

Mary Seats: 

Yes. Enormously. Every single year. Because they have made this perceived value to their customer and they are not willing to negotiate even if their manufacturer said, we will make these bags for two cents, they would still sell them for $5,000, $6,000, right?

Because it's that perceived value and the ultimate customer that they're looking for. So in marketing, I see so many brands that are struggling with sales right now. And then I look at their Instagram and I'm like, what do you do? What do you sell? Who is your ultimate customer? It's not clear who your customer is. It's not clear on why they need to buy and the value that you offer to the marketplace. 

And once brands or personal brands fix that, the rest of them. It's easy. The rest of it is so easy. It's like Apple, right? It's like even Jeff Bezos. Let's talk about Amazon for a second. When we talk about Amazon, Amazon was like, I have this marketplace where people can go online and they are going to get the products very quickly from all of these different retailers.

So instead of going to one store on another website, another website, now we can go to a marketplace and buy everything together. But guess what his holdup was? His holdup was I'm now working with UPS and USPS to deliver my packages and they're not getting to the customer on time. And I want to be able to be the fastest marketplace to get the items from offline to the customer's house.

So he said, I'm going to open up my own shipping company. He cut out the middleman. The middleman was UPS and USPS who don't ship on Saturdays, who won't pull up on Christmas Eve and deliver to you. He made his own rules to be able to scale his company. So what? What is holding you back? From really scaling.

Is it a middleman? Is it a perceived value that you have? Even with McDonald's, McDonald's sells 99 cent burgers, right? That's what that's the perceived value. No one is walking into Mcdonald's saying I'm gonna get a hundred calorie meal that's luxury, like you know when you go there you're spending five dollars to get some french fries and a burger. So like what is the perceived value that you want your audience to leave with?

How do we make that memorable? 

SCS: 

Which brings me to you taking out your middleman because when I was looking at the work, you were doing with the icing agency and then The Bakery CoWork, you're doing those shoots, those videographies, those events in your own space now.

Mary Seats: 

Absolutely. Yeah. 

SCS: 

So tell us about The Bakery. 

Mary Seats: 

So I created the bakery after wanting community. And I think that's a really big part of success for women. You have to find a community. You have to find your tribe. You have to find people that inspire you and. When I was on that airbed, I decided to travel to LA and join a co-working space because I seen an ad about an all women co-working space and there was none in Atlanta.

So I traveled to LA, to join this co-working space and I was racially profiled and it really broke my heart. We were in 2017 at the time. So for me, or 2016 at the time. So for me to be racially profiled and for us to be sitting in a member's meeting, right?

And there's me and one Indian girl and everyone else doesn't look like us. And they put everyone else as a member's class on the calendar. And when it came to me being the first minority woman to speak up and say, hey, this is what I would love to teach. I would love to teach marketing. And they said, oh, great, can you send us an email? 

And then more people, more people, they put everyone else, except me and this other Indian woman, and we looked at each other and my heart just dropped. Is it just random that this happened that you asked both of us to send you an email and would not put us in your programming?

And then the very next day, because I was there for three days, the very next day, about to go into the bathroom and they're like, ma'am, can you leave your bag outside? Because this particular co-working space was sponsored by Chanel. And sponsored by high end products, I guess. And I'm like wait, but everyone else is walking in this bathroom with their bag at that moment.

I finished my co-working with those three days. I went home, I jotted on a piece of paper that I wanted to create a space for all women no matter what your religious beliefs, political backgrounds, what your history is, what color of your skin looks like. If we peel the layers of our skin off, right, we all bleed the same. We have the same insides. We want the best for our kids. We want the best for our lives and our spouses. We care about our families and our moms and our dads. At the core of who we are, despite what we look like, we all need the same thing. 

And so I developed this coworking space to be a one stop shop for all women to be able to start grow and scale their business and be the secret ingredients of the other girl's recipe. We are literally all the secret ingredient to someone else's recipe. And that's why I created The Bakery CoWork.

And we have seven streams of revenue that come into The Bakery CoWork because I did a lot of research with other co-working spaces and why they were failing. Yeah, and I wanted to build the safest place for people to invest in. And we know if this revenue stream is down, there's this revenue stream.

If this revenue stream is down, there's this revenue stream. And so we created a one stop shop and in three years, we're growing and scaling and um, in our first year, we were fully profitable. 

SCS: 

Love it. So you're going into real estate right now, which is a tough business, as you said, and a lot of coworking spaces have had epic fails there even, you know, Netflix or Amazon prime series that were made on them.

How are you building The Bakery differently? I mean, you talk a little bit about your different revenue streams. Tell us a little bit about that inside on how you bring strategic here. 

Mary Seats: 

Yeah, absolutely. So it comes from the marketing space, right? It comes from the marketing background. I think what Cupcake Mafia or what The Bakery does different is very similar to all of the businesses that I've built, which is first built on community.

When you get a group of people that have a need that are now working together. The brand is easily gonna scale. So even within three years I've never ran any paid ads for The Bakery CoWork and we have thousands of members. But it's really based on ‘I became a member’, ‘I got crazy results from becoming a member.’, ‘I joined a class. I saved on my taxes.’ ‘I got this, I learned how to raise capital’. I've done this, I've done that.. 

They're gonna tell all their friends. We look at it as for every member that we get results for, they bring in three members. So we want to make sure that our members are getting results from our co-working spaces. Versus when I worked at other co-working spaces, it's just a table and a chair and free coffee. It's no one there. 

Our community connectors are there to connect the community together. And that's one thing that we do much differently. From the moment that you join The Bakery CoWork, we know what you need. We don't know just about your business. We talk about ‘what do you need’ so that we can find someone.

If you're saying you need a photographer, right? We're going to say, okay, wait, let's look through our directory. Here's two members who are photographers. You should connect with them. You should message them in our portal. We would then put together a group chat to be like, hey, this person is looking for a photographer. You guys should connect. 

And therefore. Baking gets started, you know dreams are baked here at the bakery. That's the one thing that we've built it on is community. The second thing is how do we take a single space and increase the revenue model from that single space. So most coworking spaces, they just have a space and they're renting the space out.

So for example, TikTok. TikTok came to Atlanta and they found our space and they were like, hey, we have an event space budget of $2,500. And we said, okay, because we have an amazing event specialist. Who's doing your catering? they're like, we don't know. Who's doing your event planning? We don't know. Who's doing your furniture, your decor, your welcome signs, your influencer guest list? Who's doing all of that stuff? Well, we don't know. 

What is your budget for the ultimate event? Oh, our budget is $25,000. Well, because we have in house everything, in house catering, in house production, in house marketing, in house decor. We can take that full budget and we can produce the event for you. TikTok flew in, their event was produced. Their influencers were there and they loved it. And they signed with us for two other events. And so it took a normal booking from $2,500 to now $25,000. And they were there for four hours in our building.

And that's the same with Good American. Good American came for the Atlanta casting, and they initially only wanted the space. But because they said, we're coming from LA, we don't want to figure out parking, valet, all these things. We trust that you guys can do it based on the work that you've already shown us. And it took it from a $15,000 booking to a number that I probably can't talk about. 

SCS: 

So a big question here is for a lot of people that tune into, you know, this sort of model, right? It sounds very labor intensive. Is it truly scalable? Address our fears here that, hey, if we invest in this kind of business, it's so dependent on the people.

If something fails, something breaks, is that truly a system? Is this, you know, an investable business really?

Mary Seats: 

It's definitely an investable business because it's growing and scaling so fast and there's, I don't think that there's ever a city that isn't having a baby shower. I don't think that there's ever a city that isn't having a birthday party.

I don't think that there's ever a brand that doesn't need a photo shoot or there isn't, you know, Dove is not saying, hey, because of the pandemic, we're not going to shoot any commercials. No, they're saying, hey, we need one photographer, six feet apart. We're going to have a model here. We need her to rub the soap on her face.

Production is still happening. Events are still happening every single day. So while we run the bakery off of eight employees. 

SCS: 

Still today? 

Mary Seats: 

Still today, eight employees. 

SCS: 

And how many locations are you in today? 

Mary Seats: 

We are opening our second location in Houston and then I believe we will move into more. I built the business around eight employees so we can start each location with eight employees and make sure that each revenue model in the business is working.

Yeah, so it is an easily investable business. We have gotten the science down to where it is. So there is an SOP, a training app for every question that anyone can ever have in my business. My operational system is absolutely flawless. The second thing is we are now developing tech around The Bakery and the app is going to be called Bake.

And why we are developing this tech is because currently when you walk into The Bakery CoWork, if you want to do an event, you have to talk to our event specialist. If you want to do a photo shoot, you have to talk to our photography, development specialist and without those two people, right?

How do we see more people? So we had 100 tours booked in one day. Those two people may not be able to see a hundred people. But if we had an app that had videos that said hi guys, welcome to the bakery. This is a one stop shop for all of your branding marketing community needs dreams are baked here. This is the services that we offer. Now push if you're looking for a photo shoot, click photoshoot.

Here's the models that we have a database for, do you need a camera? Do you need two cameras? Do you need a wardrobe stylist? Do you need this and it would be a database of people that is almost like dating, right? So once they put it into our system, our incubator system, it's gonna have AI technology, and it's gonna come out with, here's the stylist that we're hiring for you, here's the models based on what you put in the app.

When you show up to the shoot, everything is already prepared. 

SCS: 

Yeah I hear you. So a one stop shop. And just so you know, I mean, this week, we are dropping the story about Eventbrite. So Julia Hartz as our feature CEO, and they just made $323 million last year. So the events business is alive and kicking.

I mean doing this podcast. I believe you with the end to end and we're headed right now to the Women, Wealth and Legacy day. So I'll have to end with this one question since we're heading there for our firm Beyond The Billion and Culture Shift Labs. What will your billion dollar move be? And what is legacy to you?

Mary Seats: 

My billion dollar move would definitely be exiting The Bakery. I think that a strategic is going to come along and purchase our company and take the idea and the concept much further.

When I look into other coworking spaces of founders that don't look like me, that don't have the sweat equity, that don't have the resilience, that don't that have not built it in themselves before coming into this world. So I've already built several multi-million dollar companies on my own. I've already went through the losses. I've already took all that the world can handle, right? Can throw at you. And I took those crumbs and I turned them into a glorious cake. 

And so I feel like if someone was to say, hey, I love what she's doing and I want to invest in her and I want to help her scale this thing. One, it is a billion dollar business. It is a billion dollar business that is already proven in three years. To be scalable, right? 

And from that exit, I want when other minority women sit across from the table from VCs and private equity firms, they think, wow, we took a chance on Mary Seats. Remember that girl, that girl that dresses a little funny. Like the girl that's always in pink has a pink car. Remember we invested in that girl and she went on to exit and have a unicorn business for a billion dollars. 

There's another brown girl that's sitting at our table that has the same energy, same excitement, same resilience, and why maybe we should change the scope because minority women are…

SCS: 

Less than 0.5%!

Mary Seats: 

0.5 percent invested in! And if Mary did it for us, then maybe we should open the door for every other minority girl that is sitting in front of us. We should give her a chance. We shouldn't think about, wow, she didn't come from Harvard. We don't know any of her family or friends and they haven't, it's not like traditionally passed down to her.

She doesn't look like us, right? I want what I do in this world to open the door for every other brown girl. 

SCS: 

And that is your legacy. Wow, that gave me shivers. And what a word to end on. Mary Seats, MzSkittlez. Keep making Billion Dollar Moves. Give me a high five. And that's a wrap. And we gotta go. We did it!