Entrepreneurship NJ: The Importance of Being Entrepreneurist
This is the first in a series of blogs focused on entrepreneurship in New Jersey. This project was conceived by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) with the aim of learning and sharing stories about how New Jersey’s entrepreneurs build their economic lives. Governor Murphy’s comprehensive plan for building a stronger and fairer economy focuses on making government work better by fostering a dynamic, supportive environment for small businesses. This includes not only the wide array of resources available through the NJEDA that can help small businesses grow, but also a focused effort to make government more accessible to aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators. The NJEDA and the State of New Jersey do not endorse or sponsor the companies highlighted in these posts and the NJEDA has not provided financial backing to the companies described in them.
Going into this project, there was one key motivating factor about small businesses that is potentially underappreciated and in need of better focus: unlike larger businesses, where people naturally learn from one another in a community of learners, small business operation can be quite isolating and presents limited opportunity to learn from others who may be facing similar challenges. Moreover, there is so much of value entrepreneurs can learn from one another, such as the routes people took to starting their own businesses, lessons learned about operating a business, employee structures, resources available, and so on. Where are these people today with respect to their businesses, and where do they hope to go? What would help? Where do they get help? What are the challenges people face? Why run your own business in the first place?
There are a multitude of challenges in running your own business, but each story is likely to be different. And you never know how one story will resonate with someone else. In effect, this series is an effort to help create that community of learners in the small business space. It is also an opportunity for us, at the NJEDA, to learn more about the entrepreneurial experience and to better pinpoint our efforts and resources to meet the needs of the entrepreneur. With that introduction, we are pleased to share our inaugural post:
The Importance of Being Entrepreneurist
Don’t call it a small business, please. That’s the first thing you learn when you’re speaking with Diena Seeger, the founder of iBalans LLC. She makes clear what she runs is not a small business, but a business that is currently small. The statement presents an important distinction of how her vision for her company — to be a large business that currently happens to be small — has a different focus and different needs than a small business that aims to be a successful small business.
As Diena sees it, there’s the small business and there’s the entrepreneur, and their approaches to business development are quite different. They are likely to have one big thing in common: they need money. But the entrepreneur looking for venture capital during the development stage of a business and the small business owner interested in getting a business rolling on day one are not going to the same types of conferences and business community meetings. In Diena’s case, what she needs is a venture capital ecosystem — a community of investors, business developers, and labor focused on raising capital for research and development. In her locale of Atlantic County, this community is challenging to find and is more readily available in locations outside of New Jersey, such as Philadelphia and New York City. Moreover, Diena says, among the venture capital community, government resources and assistance are rarely discussed. She didn’t know that through the NJEDA, New Jersey has a host of resources available to help early-stage technology and life sciences companies access funding. Of course, why would people talk about New Jersey resources in Philadelphia or New York? There’s work to be done in providing people like Diena in New Jersey with better access to a community of like-minded entrepreneurs, which is something the NJEDA is working hard to do.
The WAV Sensorimotor Trainer
Diena’s business, at least on paper, began its development in 2013 while she was working as the COO of a nutrition tech company. Her company, iBalans LLC, develops exercise equipment and educational products for fitness and rehabilitation that focus on the link between the brain and body. According to Diena, the driving idea behind the company is to increase communication between the brain and body with respect to movement, which the company claims has significant implications for everyone, from people who have trouble doing the things most of us take for granted, such as simply getting up from a chair, to elite athletes who can see incremental performance improvements. The inaugural product developed by iBalans is the WAV Sensorimotor Trainer, a sensory based exercise bar powered by fluid motion the company says will enhance connection to the subconscious centers of the brain that help regulate movement. As Diena sees it, the WAV is more than a product — it is part of an educational program — really a philosophy — regarding exercise. In her words, “No one wants a product; they want a solution.”
The WAV’s market rollout was the outcome of a long, hard road taken. There has been lots of research and development, much of which was done with Diena’s own hands and with Diena’s own funds. She received funding from an angel investor in late 2018, which she says is enough to keep her going for the short run, but there is the constant need to figure out how to remain solvent. With much of the development of the product and the educational components of the WAV now done, Diena is constantly going to conferences, talking to distributors, creating alliances, and working with groups to get wider knowledge of and access to her product. As she says, she is “out there, hitting it hard.”
Taking all this personal and professional risk, devoting so much time and effort to growing a company — it’s clearly not for most of us. But when you speak to Diena, it’s apparent not only has it all been worth the effort, but also that she’s in her right place, doing what she should be doing. But it hasn’t always been this way. Getting to this point in her career has been a rather long and winding road.
Diena’s Path
There are a few major themes that arise when listening to Diena tell her story about her professional career:
· Government is not a dirty word — quite the opposite;
· When preparedness meets luck, that’s your opportunity; and
· There’s a constant striving to learn and apply that learning.
Diena is a product of New Jersey and its schools. But despite considering herself a bright student in high school, she admits she knew next to nothing about the landscape of post-secondary school or professional work. She was the first person in her family to attend college, receiving a tuition-free bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Stockton University.
Her first job out of college was a gold mine in terms of opportunity: collision risk modeling for aviation with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA offered Diena the opportunity to collaborate with incredibly talented scientists working on interesting projects, to travel, and generally offered more responsibility at a young age than many other organizations. She also took advantage of an offer to get a government-funded master’s degree in statistics at Rutgers University. She was even recruited to live in Paris for a year working on a collaborative research project for the FAA, which then led to an opportunity to leave the FAA and become an independent contractor working with European aviation officials.
After almost 15 years in the aviation field, Diena decided to leave Europe and head home to New Jersey to stake her claim in the world of entrepreneurship. It seems the decision was easy for her because, as she says, “aviation was not in my heart.” While Diena says she loved collaborating with smart people and working in an industry focused on the power of science and technology and what it can do for people, she felt she was missing a close connection between the technology she worked with and the people it impacted. So Diena decided to take a leap of faith and try her hand at other things to get her closer to her goal.
Her first leap on this journey was joining a New Jersey tech start-up whose focus was the development of the first global positioning system (GPS) app for cell phones. Working with this company, Diena learned key lessons about building relationships, communication, and how to work with big firms when you’re a small firm. She saw the passion with which the founders of the firm approached their work, which taught her another lesson. Diena thought, “I want that…I want to have a space I am so excited about…read about it…live it.” And the real-estate space the start-up was focused on was not that.
Diena found a position with an early phase company closer to what she realized was her personal passion: the human body, how it works, and the things you can do to effectuate change in your body. The firm was a nutrition tech company developing software that it claimed helped people better understand their dietary patterns and promoted healthy dietary change.
During these years in the start-up space Diena says she learned some important lessons:
· How to say no: “People will ask you to do whatever you’ll say yes to,” says Diena. Up until this point in her career, the things she was being asked to do were also in her best interest. But at some point, that center of gravity shifted.
· The risks of a small company working with a big company: According to Diena, “It seems like a good idea for a small company to hook a big fish, but it’s very difficult given the mismatch of resources. For the big company, they have so many resources, landing any one deal might not be that important. But for the small company, it can sap an extraordinary share of company effort and, in the end, yield nothing. You can’t bank on such a deal closing, even if all signals look promising.”
· You need to diversify your client portfolio: “You want to go for the big win, but if you can score several smaller wins, it might be the better strategy,” says Diena. “It gets back to one of life’s general lessons — don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
· Contracts don’t mean anything unless there’s a lawyer to back them up: This was a lesson Diena says she learned the hard way. “In the end, it comes down to who can fight harder and for longer. There seem to be few David beats Goliath stories in the world of start-ups,” she says.
After many years working in the start-up tech space, Diena was feeling burned out. She also suffered a personal tragedy with the passing of her grandfather, with whom she was incredibly close. She came to the realization that for her there was one bucket yet unfilled: taking the risk of building something from nothing that can change the way people do or think about things. For Diena, the key to such a venture being a personal success was not just the idea of having a “successful” company but the ability to share in that success, and sharing the journey of building a company, with her loved ones. The passing of her grandfather was a catalyst. She comes from a very small and close family, and she didn’t want to keep waiting for the “right” moment to get started and share her success with her family.
Still, Diena acknowledges that her career up to this point was all essential to getting her to where she is now. Among what she considers many crucial lessons, she learned her passion for connecting science and technology to people, her passion for creativity, her desire to take personal and professional risk, and her belief that if someone else can do this type of thing, so could she. In the end, Diena believes, you can spend your whole life learning from others what can be done, but at some point you need to take the leap because everything does not need to be exactly perfect. Diena says she realized she was smart, hard-working, and dedicated enough to build her own company. She wanted something that was her own and was going to get it.
All hands on deck
Of course, Diena did not build her company completely on her own. As she says, “You beg, borrow, and cajole to get all the resources you can find.” Luckily for Diena, she has an incredible network. As she jokes, “I’m a good stalker.” And, she notes, it’s easier than ever to build a network. Diena spent a lot of time researching the background characteristics of people she wanted to help her get her company up and running. She needed a team of experts in physical therapy and movement training who would help her design the exercises that go along with the WAV. She found people on-line, cold-called them, met them, and sold them on the idea. There are now three professionals who work part time as her “Movement Team.”
Along with this team, Diena has a network of family and friends who have helped her with everything from designing and building the WAV prototype, boxing and delivery, videoing, marketing, web site design, accounting, and finance. As she says, “I have a crazy, great support system. It’s amazing! Getting to work with my family, my friends. It makes you feel really great when all your friends show up to do a major thing.” She knows she wouldn’t be where she is today — having created a company with a product on the market — without the help of her family, friends, and co-workers, and she is so grateful for it.
Diena also recommends entrepreneurs take advantage of as many free resources as possible, such as business incubators and using UpWork to find contract help. There’s a lot of free advice to get, but as she says, what you really need are hands — not someone to tell you how to make a web site, but someone who can and will help you do it.
It’s all about people
When push comes to shove, Diena says the reason iBalans succeeds is the company’s focus on people. Diena states, “I believe in people. I invest in people. I could care less about ‘things.’ It’s experiences and people.” She heaps praise on her team, and she believes when people receive the WAV and the services that come with it, her customers see the strength of that team. She delights in stepping back and looking at what her company has created up to now, especially the benefits she sees her product bringing to the people who use it. “I don’t know how to explain the feeling of ‘I did that.’ Something I created helped someone keep their mobility.” For Diena, it’s about changing lives — that’s the measure of success.
