Originally posted via Inc.com
Small-business success stories are paved with hard work, big wins, and sometimes, a crisis or two. For Ebony Peay Ramirez, founder of Build Her World, an entrepreneurial skill-building platform for girls ages 9–13, the crisis was having to scale her team before she was ready. For Darius Davie, co-founder and creative director of Groom Guy, a luxury men’s grooming company with bespoke locations in stylish hotels, the obstacle was the global pandemic.
To solve their challenges, both founders needed resilience, agility, preparation, and a simple but critical tool: small-business insurance.
Ready or not, it’s time to grow
Peay Ramirez has worked in venture capital, served as a startup adviser, and consulted for Silicon Valley innovators. In every role, she observed an alarming bias in entrepreneurial resources.
“The entrepreneurial conversation—the language as well as the opportunities—was directed toward men, largely white men, and largely white men of a certain class. It was a little tough for me to digest that,” she says.
In 2022, she dreamed up the antidote. Build Her World is an entrepreneurial skill-building platform that includes an app. The app features a diverse set of female characters that guide girls on their entrepreneurial journeys. Peay Ramirez began developing the characters in 2014, as she always knew she would create something to encourage female entrepreneurship. Without a technical background, though, she struggled to perfect the user experience. A turning point was when the Girl Scouts agreed to workshop the app with small focus groups.
“The crisis was that I had to scale a team to run the workshops before I was ready. It would probably have been another year and a half before I would have brought anyone on,” Peay Ramirez explains.
Not only was the business not generating significant revenue, but Peay Ramirez was coping with her high-risk pregnancy. (She had a healthy baby girl in January 2024.) But quitting never crossed her mind.
“I felt really committed to the fact that this needs to exist in the world,” she explains.
So, she dipped into her personal savings, rolled out new digital products to create additional revenue, and hired part-time workers so that she could ramp up the workshops. A surprising lifesaver was the business insurance she had purchased from Hiscox.
“I could not book any building [for the workshops] without insurance coverage, and I didn’t want to have this workshop in my backyard. My workshops needed to have insurance coverage to protect me and my business, as well as the facility and the Girl Scouts,” she explains. “Keep in mind, we’re taking care of young women, making sure that they’re safe and have all the support that they needed.”
“Customers and partners are always going to be looking for credibility and the confidence that your business is properly insured,” explains Mary Boyd, CEO of Hiscox USA.
In addition to being a requirement, insurance protects a business from unexpected expenses, such as the cost of a lawsuit or property damage. The cost is “manageable, finite, and predictable,” compared with a potentially catastrophic expense, Boyd explains.
When passion outweighs fear
You can’t control the timing of an entrepreneurial vision. Davie, a men’s stylist for more than a decade, had his life-changing idea in 2020.
“It was during that time that I saw the conversation around wellness start to shift. I figured, why not test out a new space that allows for partnership and speaks to what could be this new economy that we’d be entering after the pandemic in regard to wellness, service, and hospitality? The idea was simple: Merge the worlds of personal care and hospitality together and build what we call a Groom Guy, these self-care sanctuaries—two-chair, three-chair, bespoke, modern grooming spaces,” Davie explains.
He started with a pop-up at Yours Truly DC in Washington, D.C. The hardest part about opening a physical space during Covid-19 was the unknown.
“As a solopreneur, I was trying my best to understand the current climate, to understand whatever’s going on with the current administration, with the world, and how I was going to adapt. It was really challenging to forecast and strategize,” he recalls.
Davie’s childhood friend, Matthew Sears, joined the company as co-founder after the success of the pop-up concept—a four-month engagement with a single chair that turned into a long-term residency with a full-fledged boutique salon. The two navigated uncertainty together, conducting research and seeking counsel from legal and government policy experts, as well as from their Hiscox insurance broker, particularly as they opened a second location at the PGA National Resort in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Davie describes insurance, and the support they received, as “a ring of protection around the business.”
Boyd notes it’s important to evaluate your coverage as your business grows. Seventy-five percent of U.S. small businesses do not carry sufficient insurance coverage, according to Hiscox research. Investing in adequate insurance is a way to protect yourself, and your vision.
“We’re here to provide the coverage and the courage to build, and the resilience to endure the bad days, as well as the catastrophic ones,” Boyd says.
Because on the other side of those tough moments lies growth, and the realization of an entrepreneurial dream.
