From Media Mogul to Wellness Advocate: The Necole Journey

:: 00:30

0:01:02 - (Necole Kane): Thank you.

:: 01:04

0:01:19 - (Necole Kane): What was that? XYZ. I think at the time, I just thought I was going to be an actress or something in entertainment just because that was what I was exposed to. Like, my aunt had essence magazines in her bathroom, in a basket in the bathroom. So when you go to toilet, you just look at essence or ebony. And so I was exposed to celebrities. And so I think I wanted to be a celebrity in some.

:: 01:45

0:02:04 - (Necole Kane): Black focused celebrity website that I know I consumed.

:: 02:09

0:02:20 - (Necole Kane): Crazy. So I did eventually get into entertainment. I had moved to Detroit, and I started working with a radio station. And when I was there, I was interning and helping to book celebrities to come in for interviews. And so that was my introduction to entertainment news and celebrity stuff. And I thought I was just so passionate about it. And so I ended up moving to New York to try to find an opportunity there. And I interviewed for everybody's assistant, diddy's assistant, Tyra Banks assistant.

:: 02:53

0:03:26 - (Necole Kane): Listen, every aunt the IRS had came and swiped everything I had out of my bank account at the time because of taxes due or something like that. And so I had no choice but to go to the eastern shore to stay with an aunt. And that's when I came up with my celebrity gossip site at the, like, the only opportunities there in this small town was Walmart or like a pickle plant. And I just knew that I was beyond, I don't want to make it so that anyone that works at Walmart, but that I knew what, the vision for my life was bigger than that.

:: 04:02

0:04:34 - (Necole Kane): Like, I would have to post every day and probably a certain amount of times every day for people to keep coming back and getting their news or gossip. And so I dedicated myself to that. Let's see what happens if know, one, six good months to just consistency. And, yeah, that's how Nicole bitchy was born.

:: 04:57

0:05:09 - (Necole Kane): Yeah, well, it was a couple of things happened. It was a couple of things happened. But one monumental thing that happened was my aunt. She's like, I'm letting you stay here for free, but I'm looking every day and you're on this computer, like you're not applying for jobs. She didn't really get what I was doing or the vision, and I understand why. And so she told me I had 30 days and I would have to leave.

:: 05:33

0:06:11 - (Necole Kane): So I asked the photographers, hey, can you send me the pictures, and I'll post your work, and I'll post about the party? And so we had that agreement, and so I started being known as, you need to invite her because she's going to post our stuff on her site and make it look like it's popping. And so that's how I kind of got my first big break in the Atlanta scene as a blogger. But my biggest break was they invited me to a listening party for chili, and I didn't know they expected me to interview her. So afterwards, they're like, oh, are you ready for the interview? And I'm like, I'm not ready.

:: 06:45

0:07:11 - (Dreena Whitfield): And so then what caused the rebrand to exo Nicole? Because if you were so successful with Nicole Bitchy.

:: 07:17

0:07:40 - (Necole Kane): I would get death threats. I shared an office with my publicist, and someone one time called as soon as I left out to go to an award show and said, tell Nicole she's dead, and hung up. And I had just left the. You know, just going through all those different things and not feeling at peace within myself and wanting to live my own life. Like, I felt like I was living my life as a spectator to everybody else's.

:: 08:06

0:08:43 - (Dreena Whitfield): And what was the meaning behind exo Nicole?

:: 08:47

0:09:16 - (Necole Kane): What's going on down there? Like, intimacy, relationships. And I didn't see many platforms for that. And at the time, essence was skewing very older, like, 35 and up. And I'm like, well, where the 18 to 34 year old was going. And so that's where the idea for Exo Nicole came about.

:: 09:33

0:09:44 - (Necole Kane): In terms of different features, PR wise? I use PR more so to tell my story. The first time I ever hired a publicist was in 2010, and everybody just knew about Nicole Bitchy, but they didn't know what she looked like. And so the first story that ran was in Ebony, and it talked about me losing my parents, sleeping on couches. And people were, you know, and so they got invested in the person that ran the brand. And I think that helped me. It humanized me, because before then, bloggers were just, like, faceless behind the screen, and now there's this person, and I know her story, and so I think it creates connection, and so it tells the story in a way that advertisement can't and et cetera. So that's how PR I feel has fed into my career.

:: 10:39

0:10:57 - (Necole Kane): I'm telling you all, when you ask God to use you, you can't choose how he uses you. And I say this now, I'm a tear up.

:: 11:09

0:11:11 - (Necole Kane): Sorry.

:: 11:11

0:11:13 - (Necole Kane): I tear up on this part because a year, maybe six months prior January is when he contacted me. September. I had put out this video called what I wish I had known before leaving a successful brand. I'm living in Arizona at the time. I'm not really thinking much about it, but I'm talking about some of the struggles I had at the beginning of the exo Nicole days and just things I didn't know. Just being all honest and transparent.

:: 11:44

0:12:21 - (Necole Kane): And I felt like the world was watching me fail. And it drove me in such a state of depression, and I just really didn't know what I was going to do. Like, exo Nicole was there, but it was taking up all my money. I was overrunning it. I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself. And I'm like, wow. Everyone saw me make this brand move to. My biggest thing was young women can't see me fail because they got to know it's okay to transition, that when they're no longer loving their life, they got to know it's okay. And it might not be smooth as you're going for that life you want to ultimately love. But I just couldn't let them see me fail. Like, that couldn't be the end of my story.

:: 13:11

0:13:51 - (Necole Kane): That's a whole nother type of pressure. Exactly. I'm like, I got five people I can send you that might be good candidates for this, but I don't know if I'm the one. But every month, the same time every month, he kept calling me. And, you know, what are you doing? Are you sure you're not interested in the position? So the fourth month, they must have saw that I had went to LA briefly, and I was about to ride back to Arizona, and his assistant said, hey, will saw you're in LA. He would love to meet up for you for dinner.

:: 14:21

0:14:50 - (Necole Kane): Because the God was like, what you doing? And even he had asked me, what was I doing at the time. I was studying holistic nutrition, and I was going to go into holistic health, which is funny, because that's what I do now, but you get rerouted on your journey a few times. And so after that dinner, he turned to me and he said, what is meant to be will be, and think about it, pray on it. Then the conversation turned to them buying my website.

:: 15:16

0:15:18 - (Dreena Whitfield): I was like, what do you even say to that?

:: 15:20

0:15:59 - (Dreena Whitfield): But also, I just want to ask, even just being presented, the offer to be acquired, right?

:: 16:08

0:16:09 - (Dreena Whitfield): Because you got to think back, like, you started with Nicole bitchy transitioned into exo Nicole. Was this even part of your dream when you even created the initial site?

:: 16:23

0:16:50 - (Necole Kane): So maybe, I don't know how long I was on his radar, but just I was kind of scared, and I didn't have any friends to turn to for advice. I didn't have a mentor or a circle to talk to. No one had been on that level before, so it was very isolating. And so I remember the last conversation we had when I almost walked away from the opportunity, and I remember telling them, this cannot fail because young girls are watching me, and this is going to be big if I do this, but it has to be successful if I do this.

:: 17:22

0:17:51 - (Necole Kane): And so then I went through another period of isolation and entrepreneurship that people don't talk about not having anyone to relate to.

:: 17:59

0:18:12 - (Necole Kane): Look, this person, it's almost like you're about to get married to somebody you never dated.

:: 18:18

0:18:20 - (Necole Kane): Married at first sight. I haven't even gone on a few dates with you. I don't know what this is going to be like. Are we in alignment? Are our features in alignment? Do you want kids? Do I want kids? What kind of culture do you want this site to have? I know what my vision is, but is it the same as yours? And so that. And just little things like making sure that my future was set in case I did decide to have kids and a family.

:: 18:46

0:19:10 - (Dreena Whitfield): Congratulations, though, for real. And then, like you said, you never knew anyone that was even in this position or even anything that related to acquisition, especially with black women, had a negative tone to it or story around it. And so as more black businesses and black female entrepreneurs, their companies are getting acquired or they're taking on investment or partners. What's like, one tip of advice you could share based off of your own experiences.

:: 19:44

0:20:13 - (Necole Kane): But I don't think I quite knew what I needed, team wise, to really build my business. I would have known to bring in a proper chief operating officer, or what is it? Is it the chief marketing officer? What do I need to really and make sure that I bring them from organizations that are publications so that they could, because I was guessing my way through both careers. And so to have someone that can teach me what I don't know, fill in the holes of what I didn't know.

:: 20:48

0:21:17 - (Necole Kane): I had a lot of depression around it. I cried all 20. Were we in 2023? Yeah, I cried all 2022. I did. Leading up to it, I knew my contract was ending in September, and I wasn't going to renew it. And this was the second contract because my first one was three years, my second one was two. And I was just like, this is a lot, because it's like birthing a baby, raising her for a little bit, but then handing her off to someone else to raise. And that was just a lot for me to process.

:: 21:46

0:22:09 - (Dreena Whitfield): So, yeah, I was going to ask.

:: 22:12

0:22:17 - (Dreena Whitfield): Or did they start to pull things.

:: 22:20

0:22:47 - (Necole Kane): And that was before I came up with the idea for my happy flow. And that's when I knew I had to figure it out, and fast. Yeah. So I came up with the idea for my happy flow, march to 2021. I think once they saw me maneuvering with my happy flow and the brand growing, they got a sense that I probably wouldn't be there long. So they had to start teaming up and preparing for the transition. And so they did bring in an EIC eventually and other talent, and things started shifting very quickly.

:: 23:23

0:23:55 - (Necole Kane): So anyone? We like to applaud and cheer on when we see our fellow entrepreneurs. And they've raised 5,000,020 5 million. But just know they're going to sell that business one day. Either that or they're going to go public. And so I think there's a lack of information around how acquisitions work and investment dollars work.

:: 24:16

0:24:21 - (Necole Kane): So my happy flow is my baby right now. It's my newborn. I love her to death, but I started my happy flow for so many reasons. One a lot of people don't know. I held my mom's hand as she took her last breath. She died of breast cancer. I watched her plan her funeral, and at the time, I just felt like I didn't have a lot of information on how to help her or heal her. And when I started getting close to the age that she passed, of course, I'm like, how do I prevent myself from getting breast cancer? And so that's how I got into holistic health and finding out the correlation between having higher estrogen levels, which black women tend to carry, and breast cancer tumors. And also, if you have high estrogen levels, you're at high risk for fibroids and all these different reproductive complications that we have as black women. And so just through my studies of vitamins, I've studied hormone health.

:: 25:21

0:25:48 - (Necole Kane): And it's because your period tells you a lot about what's going on with your health. It's actually your body's monthly report card. So if it's coming and it's painful, if it's like, have bloating, heavy flows, it's irregular or staying around too long, it's a sign of hormonal imbalances. But it's also a sign that you're probably at high risk for fibroids, you're at high risk for cancers. And since we were never taught that, we just went with periods, painful periods for most of our lives, or the doctor put us on birth control, which is dangerous, but I'm not going to get in that because I have very controversial thoughts overall.

:: 26:28

0:26:58 - (Necole Kane): And I say this because we have so many customers that come to us. They were about to go in for a fibroid surgery. They started my happy flow. They go to the fibroid surgery four months later, and the doctor can't find the fibroids. Or I've had instances where women had endometriosis. They had pcos. They were told they may never get pregnant, and they got pregnant within, like, three or four months of being on a product.

:: 27:22

0:27:35 - (Dreena Whitfield): Can I just say, I just love this whole transition. You are so informed, and you know your stuff.

:: 27:46

0:27:47 - (Dreena Whitfield): Because I'm like, there's a lot of things related to periods and hormones that, like you said, we're not taught or informed about. And so how did you even create the product? What's the process behind creating the product?

:: 28:00

0:28:32 - (Necole Kane): Normally, black women are deficient in magnesium and other b six and those type of things. And that's where you see your moods being kind of all over the place. And so I literally thought of the things we're normally deficient in. We have very busy lives. Some of us are mothers. Some of us are like bosses. We're skipping breakfast. I don't recommend skipping breakfast because it can lead to insulin resistance and blood sugar imbalances. But most people do. They reach for coffee and it's just.

:: 29:07

0:29:09 - (Necole Kane): Yeah. So just knowing the lifestyles of black women and knowing that most supplements are not creating most wellness and vitamin brands are not creating supplements. With our lifestyle and the way we eat and our diets in mind, we love our seasoning. And so I was like, okay, a lot of these vitamins are missing key nutrients that we specifically need. I don't know, a vitamin on the market, that's like my happy flow. There's times when you might get angry customer and they're like, I'm going to take my business somewhere else for whatever it might be. USPS was delayed on their package, right?

:: 29:47

0:30:26 - (Necole Kane): So just knowing the value, I've seen two of the hero ingredients and vitamin shops sitting on the shelves next to each other. Dim and endo, three carbonal. And I looked at the prices, and them two alone were more expensive than my happy flow, which has seven additional vitamins and minerals in there. So I know it's such a great value. And you condense your vitamin routine. Now you only get to take two capsules versus I was taking at 1.15 different vitamins in the morning.

:: 30:55

0:30:59 - (Necole Kane): I think when you're an entrepreneur, you're grinding, you're hustling, you're taking all these courses, you got coaching, you're doing all these things to scale your business, but your relationship muscle becomes very underdeveloped. And so for me, I didn't really even know how to be in relationships with people because I knew how to be a great boss, but I didn't know how to be like a good girlfriend or a good et cetera. And so I've been slowly growing my business, but very slowly in a way that allows me to have a personal life and to focus on that area, because I do want kids, I do want to be married.

:: 31:34

0:32:03 - (Necole Kane): Let me do all this content, let me do all these events. And I saw myself about to be on a hamster wheel again of my Life. And I was like, you have to grow this business in a way that you haven't done previous ones so that you can have peace, the type of peace and the type of balance you need. And I peeled it back and I worked on the foundational stuff first, which was putting Email flows in place and automations and that type of thing. And now I work like two, 3 hours a day, if that.

:: 32:33

0:33:01 - (Necole Kane): And I will say, I want to just say the last two years, this year has been great to me, but the two years prior, just first me getting closer to the age as my parents were when they passed, but then I was going through all this friction at Exxon Nicole, which was telling me it was time for me to go. You'll know when it's time for you to transition, because everything feels like it's forced and resistance.

:: 33:27

0:34:09 - (Necole Kane): And I did register the business and all that, but God is a mighty God. And I got that trademark and it was almost like impossible for me to get the trademark. But people got out of the way, honey. Like people weren't responding to office actions and stuff on their side. So it dropped off and I got cleared through.

:: 34:30

0:34:31 - (Necole Kane): Yes, part of the plan. So it was a lot of obstacles the first two years, but I knew God gave me this calling. And if he gives you the calling, he's going to move mountains for you to answer that call. So I knew this was a path that I was supposed to be on.

:: 34:46

0:34:55 - (Necole Kane): Oh, man, I'm so excited. I think it's going to blow my mind. Sometimes I wake up with the vision of us on target shelves. Our logo, I love our branding. We're continuously tweaking things along the way. But I really love the community. I love everything about running this brand.

:: 35:14

0:35:21 - (Necole Kane): Okay.

:: 35:22

0:35:25 - (Necole Kane): You know what the tv be watching me. Probably something like Harlem or. Yeah.

:: 35:33

0:35:37 - (Necole Kane): I think at some point there was a time where I moved every year, year and a half, and it was almost like there's this concept called destination addiction where you feel like happiness is always in the next location, the next person, the next thing. And so it's almost like I was switching locations looking for happiness, but I was the same person each time. So I had to change something within myself to find that happiness and not look for it in all these different places and people and things. And so I think that's what I would tell myself when it comes to happiness. Like, you have to find it within and right where you are now.

:: 36:15

0:36:24 - (Dreena Whitfield): What's one trend you hope never comes back?

:: 36:31

0:37:02 - (Dreena Whitfield): Okay, well, Nicole, thank you so much for joining me today. I truly, truly appreciate you. Where can everyone find follow you on social media? You and my happy flow.

:: 37:13