We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Barbara Jones. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Barbara below.

Barbara, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

Hello Everyone, my name is Barbara Jones and I am the CEO of Freeing Returns. Freeing Returns is a Returns Management and Profit Optimization platform that helps Retailers and Merchants identify how they are losing money due to fraud, shrink and operational inefficiencies. Our platform is used by Loss Prevention/Asset Protection teams, e-Commerce Fraud Teams and Organized Retail Crime (ORC) Prevention Teams.

The idea for Freeing Returns started at a Hackathon! For those who may not be familiar with Hackathons, it’s a weekend long event where computer programmers and coders create software from start to finish in 48 hours or less! The events are like “tournaments” for coders and brings together some of the best and newest coders to participate in these events.

My company and I were invited to a Hackathon that was sponsored by the ATDC and Worldpay. There were 3 of us at the Hackathon, Calm Mattier, who is now our CTO, Paul Nguyen and me. Most Hackathons have “challenges” or problems that the coders attempt to solve in 48 hours or less. They usually have cash prizes, awards, giveaways, free food and drinks, and the perks that come with winning Best in Show or the main prize.

The 3 of us arrived at the Hackathon and reviewed the challenges and noticed that MOST of the challenges were to solve issues related to customer returns and refunds for Retailers and Merchants. There are many issues with Returns for Retailers and Merchants. First, its the loss of the Sale, they must give money back which decreases their sales. Then there is the reverse logistics of taking merchandise back – do you resell it; do you discount it, do you throw it away? Then there is the fraud aspect, where individuals or crime rings, game the system through a Retailer or Merchants Refund policy. Many issues, which my team and I knew all too well.

So we tackled ALL of the Returns challenges, created and designed solutions and Calm Mattier stayed up for 48 hours coding the entire solution!

Needless to say, we WON BEST in SHOW, the top cash prize, tons of giveaways, and the perk of being named the WINNER of the Hackathon. This is truly one of the best weekends EVER for me and the company. Now, can we actually build a complete product and build a company around this new offering of Freeing Returns?

We took the ideas that came from the Hackathon and put steps in place to build a product that we could sell to the biggest retailers/merchants in the World!

After the Hackathon, we were on cloud NINE but it took over 3 years for us to truly build the vision from the Hackathon. We faced many challenges like attrition, running out of capital, lacking the expertise to build some of the features, LIFE in general and being the only company in our space that was led by a team of minorities, women, LGBTQ and veterans!

One of the biggest issues for us was the lack of capital and funding. We were so excited after the Hackathon and all the praise we received from the judges, the people in the room and press related to the event. We believed that it would be EASY to raise funding to build Freeing Returns … absolutely NOT.

As the CEO, I pitched this idea to everyone who would listen. I showed them what we created in 48 hours, imagine what we could do if we had the capital to finish this great idea. No one was listening and I began to doubt myself and the idea. Thankfully, I had a wonderful support system around me who kept telling me that God would not give me an idea like this one, only for me to NOT execute on it. The encouragement helped but after getting so many No’s, my spirit was beginning to break.

I decided to stop pitching and to focus on selling and was content doing this until I received a text from Rodney Sampson, one of the leaders in the Atlanta Startup Ecosystem AND an advisor to my company. Rodney asked me to pitch again but this time on a HUGE stage. There was a $2M dollar pitch competition that was being hosted by the former founder of AOL, Steve Case himself. I was intrigued but a bit shy about pitching again but Rodney persuaded me to apply.

Freeing Returns was selected among hundreds of applicants as one of the TOP 5 companies to pitch for the $2M dollars in prizes! Although we did not win any of the top prizes, we attracted the attention of Morgan Stanley and their Multicultural Innovation Lab. Morgan Stanley invested $250K into Freeing Returns and we were able to hire our CTO and first full-time Coder. This team completed the build out of our initial offering. We were well on our way to finally building the idea that came to us during a Hackathon, 3 years earlier.

Fast forward to now where we have raised over $4M dollars in funding from celebrities like Serena Williams, software giants like Google and funds that invest in under-represented founders like Aperture Venture Capital and Zane Venture Fund. We have some of the largest Retailers in the world excited about Freeing Returns. We have doubled our team AND have been named the Emerging Minority Technology and Industries Firm of the Year for 2022!

Just think, it all started from being invited to a Hackathon!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Barbara Jones is the founder/CEO of Lillii RNB Inc and has been in the Retail Technology sector for over 20 years and have been on the founding teams of 2 Retail Technology startups that both exited for close to $100M.

Barbara has created Retail Tech Software that is running in over 4000 stores throughout the US, Canada and Japan. She has been in the roles of POS Architect and Solutions Architect for The Home Depot, LL Bean and PepBoys and many more solving multi-million dollar issues for them.

Her newest venture has been to transition Lillii RNB Inc from a System Integration consulting company to an Enterprise Solutions company with their Returns Management and Profit Optimization platform, Freeing Returns™ – that helps retailers find the Fraud and Shrink that’s HIDING in their Data. We have successfully closed our Seed round, led by Serena Williams’ venture fund and Aperture Venture Capital – bringing our total investments to over $4M.

Barbara lives in Lithonia, GA but is from Austin, TX. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2020, the year of COVID-19, my company was negatively affected, like many other companies due to mandatory shutdowns to lessen the spread of the virus. Our customers are large retailers who had to close their doors during the lockdown. This caused us to lose over 50% of our clients in 2020. I was faced with a very tough decision, close my company, or fight like hell to stay in business by pivoting! I chose the latter and pivoted my company from a Retail IT Consulting firm to an Enterprise Solutions company focused on Retail Loss Prevention solutions. We did this by securing funding from the Paycheck Protection Program and the EIDL Loan program. We secured enough funding to keep our entire team in place who began working to build our Enterprise Software as a Service offering, Freeing Returns.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

Running your own business is very hard work and at times very stressful. This stress is magnified when the business is struggling or during a business slow-down. This happens in most businesses and why many businesses fail within the first 5 years. I remember my 3rd year in business and after I had exhausted my word-of-mouth advertising efforts.

I’d hired a team of 7 full-time employees and we lost one of our largest accounts. At the time, I was a bit too optimistic and decided to keep everyone working at full capacity as I tried to find new customers. After a few months and with no luck finding any new customers, the business account was starting to dwindle and we were running out of cash. This was one of the lowest points in my companies almost 10 years of existence. Things got so dire that I had to take myself OFF payroll so that I could pay my team.

I had to sell some of my real estate holdings and even got behind in my personal home mortgage payments. We still did not have any new customers and I missed payroll. My team came to work on pay day and some did not receive a payment and others received half of their check. I was so embarrassed that I considered NOT coming into the office that Friday.
I came anyway with my head hung very low. When I got to the office, my entire team was there and working very hard – they knew we were struggling and were doing everything they could to keep the company afloat. I was so motivated, it brought me to tears to see my team’s dedication. With this renewed commitment by my team, I was able to close a vital new client and one of the biggest deals in the company’s history.

We were back in business and growing!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.freeingreturns.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thequeencoder/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/freeing-returns/?viewAsMember=true
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/freeingreturns