Ep# 047: How to Launch a Business From Nothing with Jenna Irvin
Have you ever just meet someone that you were in awe of? That’s how I felt when I sat down to talk to Jenna Irvin!
This girl opened her first business (a Barre studio) at 21, fresh out of college, and went on to sell it for double the investment in less than a year. By 23, she owned and operated two multi-six figure businesses.
But aside from her business acumen, I was even more impressed with her wisdom at such a young age and her willingness to be vulnerable enough to share the failures she experienced along the way!
I felt like this was one of those chats that everyone needed to hear - so many gold nuggets that can be applied in the journey of business and life but also just such an inspiring and real testament to what’s possible!
Jenna, Tell us a little bit more about you and what came to be in order for you to build this business and scale it to where it's what it's grown to today
JENNA: Yeah, absolutely! I just have always kind of had a passion for entrepreneurship, both of my parents own business together. So, I grew up with that mindset being modeled. And I went to college at High Point University in North Carolina. I was a basketball player up until that point. And so when I got to college, I was kind of searching for a new technique to dive into the fitness industry. And in doing that, I discovered Pure Barre, (which is the franchise that I now own) and just fell in love with the workout! (I've never been a workout from home person.)
So I went home for a summer and there wasn't a Pure Barre close by and I was like, “You know? If I really stick to this, if I do this every day, all summer and still have this love for the technique and for the company… (Cause I was kind of learning more about it as I was diving in) then I will continue to look into it as being a career opportunity.” And so, I did!
I dove into the workout all summer and started to look deeper into the business model and I was blessed in the fact that I had some investment money put aside from stocks from growing up. And I hadn't really decided what I was going to do with that, but it was important to me that I didn't just use it to travel and not be something that I could have a strong ROI on. So, the first semester of my senior year, I did college in three years. It was my junior + senior year combined, and I decided… I think I'm just going to go for this!
I was taking a business course and I had to put together a business plan. I started to research the company and I interviewed in November of the first semester of my senior year and got approved to be an owner of a studio. I was approved for a market in Pennsylvania and quickly has some trouble with real estate and decided to shift markets to Maryland. So that was where I opened my first studio and it was a town that I didn't know anyone. So it was in a very interesting experience because I was just recently graduated college. I had to say goodbye to my friends and was in this space of not really knowing what's next. And I think it attributed to my success for sure because the personal life was kind of absent. I really just dove in!