It’s late and we’re tired. But we’re TOTALLY inspired.
That’s how we feel when we’re in the presence of superstars – the kind of people who are building extraordinary businesses from an idea to reality and LOVING it along the way!
The trip in to L.A. last night got us into our hotel at the equivelent of 2am. We were only slightly ticked about the fact that we had to wait about 20 minutes for the valet to bring our bags to our rooms. We were much MORE ticked when, the next morning, they didn’t have Jeff’s drycleaning (wardrobe) ready at 7am like they promised. It was more like 9am and that made us almost an hour late for our day of shooting a “Key Moves” TV commercial for StartupNation. We shrugged off the frustration, though, as soon as we arrived at the first filming location – the office of Lavetta Willis and Dada Footwear.
When you see Lavetta, you basically have no choice but to brighten up. She’s just amazing and radiant – the human embodiment of “there’s no stopping me.” She had returned the night before from a production meeting in Taiwan. We caught her today, knowing tomorrow she would get back on a plane tomorrow and fly to NYC. All done up, but barefoot under her desk, Lavetta lit up the camera as she talked about one of her many Key Moves for success.
After getting our footage of her and reading our own lines (jeff wearing his freshly dry cleaned clothes, of course), our film crew jumped in our three cars and wagon-trained across L.A. to meet with yet another inspiring entrepreneur – Abbie Rapport. She’s sold millions upon millions of pieces of jewelry. Like Lavetta, she had also offered to share her Key Moves in our commercial. Abbie had returned from NYC the day before and was scheduled to travel to San Fran tomorrow. But she was totally on today! She showed us some of her latest designs, in between shoots. It was clear to us that she’s still totally passionate about her work.
And now we’ve made it back to our hotel, totally jazzed by having time today with some amazing entrepreneurs. What a privilege it was to be in their environments watching them work their magic. We’re more excited than ever about the potential for StartupNation to help people create their own success, hopefully following in the footsteps of people like Lavetta and Abbie.
