We recently connected with Candace Spears and have shared our conversation below.
Candace, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
Floor23 digital started as a marketing business. I knew I need to have a clear business that could solve a need (and at this point I had decided I was leaving in corporate within 12 months so leaned on the skills I had to make fast traction) so I leaned into that idea had the website up, offer figured out in a couple weeks. Got to work on some cold email outreach, landed first client in 30 days. I was targeting real estate agents at the time.
That business was picking up momentum, and I had a couple of other clients that trickled in…I was basically setting up and running facebook ads to bring them clients.
However the idea that kept ringing as me was sharing my knowledge of entrepreneurship as a means of taking ownernship of time, talent and identity and that’s what led me to the idea of starting a posdcast, Ambition, Honey & Hustle, then leaning the direction of Floor23 more towards entrepreneurial education, specifically in the lens of mindset and lot of how to on marketing and technology which I had a strong bacground in.
Eventually that path led me to start government contract and the 5 year contract with NASA really solidified my thoughs and desires in the innovation space and has led Floor23 Digital to be what it is today.
So it’s really been about taking ideas, testing them learning quickly, and continue to improve or iterate. Not letting ideas sit on the shelf.
Candace, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Candace Spears is an influential serial entrepreneur, and author in the open innovation space solving audacious problems at the scale, speed, and service of freedom. She is the Founder and CEO of Floor23 Digital, a technology company whose work focuses on tapping into the wisdom and brilliance of diverse crowds to engage and disrupt organizational, community and economic dynamics for the better.
Candace started her first company in 2010, and until Floor23 went in and out of playing in significant spaces in technology and marketing in corporate life. She formerly taught and coached the Agile mindset and Lean Startup principles across three multi-billion dollar companies including Fortune 500, General Electric (GE), helping them rethink the work they do, innovate in approach, and to deliver business value faster.
And now, solving some of the world’s toughest problems, her company, Floor23 actively brings the power of crowd-based research, crowd-based innovation, and innovation education to clients like NASA, US Department of Interior, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Milwaukee Public Schools, and more.
Wife to an equally driven entrepreneur. Mom of three girls. Mom of an initiative, formerly called Company Curators (New name to be announced at a later date) to support entrepreneurship through the black female experience. Mom of Milorah Property Group, a real estate holding company with land in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Candace’s life mission is to create opportunities and “assist freedom.” Her mission has been featured in Black Enterprise, NBC, Fox, Working Mother and more. She’s in relentless pursuit of game-changing growth and innovation that absolutely alters people’s lives for the better.
About the company:
Floor23 Digital, LLC (Floor23) is a technology company that solves product, process, and public engagement problems through crowd-based challenges, entrepreneurial and innovation education. We also provide consultative services in innovation strategies for corporations, local and national government entities, and educational institutions
Motto: Our motto is to assist freedom, and we live that out in the work that we do.
Floor23 Digital, LLC was founded in February 2020, by founder and current CEO, Candace Spears and has journeyed to become an award-winning provider of innovative solutions that support technology scouting, new product/process development, research, ideation and community engagement. The company is currently focused on providing a mix of innovative products and services to customers who are in need of leveraging or engaging an external crowd to generate solutions that can solve their greatest STEM, public infrastructure, or public policy-related problems.
Core Business
Public Engagement
Research and Development
Innovation Strategy
Entrepreneurship & Innovation Education
Products and Services
Our offerings fall into multiple categories:
Software Products:
Floor23 InnoBearTM – An innovation challenge hosting platform.
Our cloud-based software can be used to reduce the complexity of moving pieces involved to host innovation or engagement challenges. It also manages the pipeline of arising ideas and solutions all the way to their ultimate production implementation.
Floor23 InnoFrogTM – An innovation and entrepreneurship training application
InnoFrog is an on-demand learning application that supports the commercialization of ideas through, innovation, entrepreneurship, and aspects of technology transfer training. It’s like having a mentor for challenge participants to support them through successful challenge execution and downstream next steps.
Youth Education Product:
Young, Agile, and Digital Entrepreneurs (YAD) – A program to meet the needs and opportunities of elementary through high school youth that desire to explore alternative and promising entrepreneurial career paths.
The signature program, YAD Big Ideas, and Small Business program is a 5th-12th grade program consisting of an online learning component, physical innovation kit, and corresponding teacher/facilitator guide. It’s designed to have students exercising innovative thinking and provides introductions to commercialization and Agile product development concepts through teaming activity in the classroom.
Consultative Services:
Strategic Innovation Planning – Custom Engagement
Thinking about what you can do to bring an innovative approach to your organization’s product, process, or people engagement? If so, having innovation as a strategic approach alongside the ability to measure the success of your efforts is key. We support a custom look at planning for innovation and not leaving it to chance.
Our Values and Principles
Every Individual Matters: No one is greater than the other, and every human has value to contribute regardless of who and where they are…find it. Maximize it.
Speed over Perfection: Always assume you can be wrong, so move quickly to get real-world evidence of the truth.
Assist Freedom: It is a right and is deserving to every human and organization, however they may choose to define it…getting there is always a worthy ideal.
Untold Stories are Gold: Everyone has more to the story. The more unlocks the true value and the satisfaction. Find it.
Our Mission
Our mission at Floor23 Digital is to create pathways for humans to experience unrestricted growth expressed so powerfully that it quantumly shifts organizational and economic success
Sampling of Past Clients
Read and watch more client stories by visiting https://www.floor23digital.com/customerstories
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
When I first started I used money from the job I had at the time. As time went on the business began to fund itself using the revenue generated from the customers. Along the way, I’ve gotten capital either from grants or loans, but for sure there’s nothing like having cash from sales as the foundation and support of the business. We’ve always been a bootstrapped business and that absolutely hasn’t always been easy, but one think I think it’s more to know is that “constraint breeds creativity.” So there’s always a way to get where your vision is leading you, money is not an excuse to not take action.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
That money can only come slowly and pick up speed. That something I had to work on and continue to work on the reality is that. Money can come in any quantity at any time and there is no set prescription for things have to work, and I”ve seen i to be true, but it’s one that has to continue to be reinforced. Money mindset is everything in business!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.floor23digital.com
- Instagram: @candacespears
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/candacespears
Image Credits
I took the photo with a bluetooth tripod set :)