We recently connected with Jeanetta & Ashley Brantley and have shared our conversation below.

Jeanetta & Ashley, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job

A previous job that both Netta and I share that has taught us many valuable lessons that we’ve applied to our business was with RGIS. RGIS is a company that provides inventory services to other companies like Walmart, Target, HEB, Forever 21, Macy’s, etc. We worked as inventory associates or “Top Guns” for RGIS in San Antonio for two years, and it was the roughest 2 years I’d ever had with a job. The people were great, but the nature of the job was tough. As top guns, Netta and I were amongst the fastest counters in our district and had ridiculous work ethics. Thus we were often overworked but still managed to out-work and count faster than a lot of our colleagues. One of the stores that we were assigned to was Family Dollar. Netta and I would count more than 50-60% of that entire store, front and back, within 3-4 hours. We were moving! All because we refused to spend 8 hours working for another company versus ourselves. The faster we counted, the quicker we got home, so that’s what RGIS instilled within us. Hustle. We already had that within us, we’d been entrepreneurs for years previously, but RGIS made us realize how much more we had. If I can wake up at 3 AM for work after just getting home at 12 AM from the previous 8-10 hour shift, and work until 4 pm just to leave from that shift and go home to nap because the next shift started at 8 PM that night, and then work until midnight that same night and perform MY BEST in each shift to sustain my pay because it’s based on my performance, I can show up and show out for myself too. With RGIS, we realized that if we can move like this, get up even when we’re tired, move even when our body and feet ache, and perform our best for someone else, we can do that for our own company and brand. Too often, people think that being an entrepreneur is hard because it requires so much, and to those who think that, I encourage you to sit and observe how much effort and energy you’re giving to something or someone else. Does entrepreneurship require so much, or do we just have little to give because we’re already giving so much of ourselves to someone else? As business owners, we’re all about taking care of business, and the world waits nor does time stop for anyone. You have to be willing to go for it and give it all you’ve got to succeed. What RGIS proved to us was that we had the grit, will, strength, and ability to be the bosses that we desired to be, and til this day, we apply the same energy that we’d given to others, to our own brand.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

In a nutshell, we are filmmakers who are also holistic herbalists and business owners. We consider ourselves serial entrepreneurs because once our minds are made up on an idea, we plan and execute,… Even if we’re not fully prepared. Our most successful brand to date is S.M.A.R.T. Vegan, which has taken us from herbalists to social media influencers. We created this brand solely to educate the masses on the importance of a healthy plant-based diet and to help people heal from sickness and disease naturally. Along with the education provided through social media and courses offered on our website, we also provide dietary and herbal supplements like seamoss, herbal capsules, and syrups created in-house using our recipes. Before we met, Ash and I had health concerns of our own. Ash was anemic and was suffering from the excruciating pains that came with her monthly menses, whereas I was dealing with obesity, kidney problems, and nearing dialysis. Without the help of doctors, we reversed every disease and/or condition within no time. After experiencing the healing benefits of going plant-based, we wanted to share this experience and information with the world and help others heal themselves. Within that timeframe, we spent countless amount of hours researching and studying human biology, nutrition, science, and more to fully understand what we’re teaching and why we’re providing our products and services. We didn’t want to just suppress and treat the symptoms, we wanted to get to the root cause of the issue and eliminate that. This has become the biggest and most important problem we solve for our clientele. We help them understand why and where the disease or illness came from, and we help them to reverse it naturally by implementing a fasting regimen. We created and launched an E-Book called “Fasting With S.M.A.R.T. Vegan”, which teaches and shows you how to fast effectively while following the steps of a program we created called the “Iron Man Fast.” It’s a 7-day fruit/water fast that detoxifies the body and resets the entire immune system. That’s what we’re most proud of. I also feel that that’s what sets us apart from other healers because we allow you to be human. We don’t force a specific lifestyle or diet on anyone, and we’ve established a judgment-free zone. People are free to live in accordance to however they choose, while we provide the information, education, programs, and products. We understand that nobody is perfect, and we all fall short. When they’re ready to heal themselves, they know that we provide the help and information to get them on the way to a healthier life.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The biggest lesson to unlearn was that failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s easy to get down in business. There’s always things to fix or do better, and for small businesses like ours, we may not always have the capitol needed to address all the problems that we have — so sometimes we fail or miss the mark. Those failures would get us down until we realized that we were still growing despite making those mistakes or missing the mark. The truth is that those failures and mistakes are a natural part of the journey towards success. We hadn’t come this far because we were perfect, we’ve gotten this far because we never gave up. Truth be told some of those mistakes were necessary to make for us to grow into better business owners. Had we not made those mistakes and learned from them, we would’ve never seen the success that we experience today. So failure isn’t something to run from and avoid. It’s something to experience and get through. They are the building blocks to success and nothing to be ashamed of. To be the skilled and equipped leaders that we desire to be, must embrace adversity.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Honesty, transparency, and quality is what has carried us into where we are and the reason why we have the support system that we have today. We’ve faced a multitude of challenges that we initially did not know how to overcome, thus we’ve had to learn a lot to get where we are as owners, influencers, and practitioners. This means that we’ve had our fair share of mistakes while trying to learn the ropes and honesty and transparency was the best way out of those tough lessons and experiences. It’s better to own up to our mistakes than t lie about them. Honesty and transparency about our mistakes and faults is what has helped us keep our customer base strong. The effort that we put into our research is what enables us to provide the quality that people want. We provide the absolute best that we can with any and everything that we supply because we care to research, try out and investigate things before putting them out onto the market. We have an awesome reputation for each of our products, so much so that we have often struggled to keep some products like our syrups available. Just like a multitude of our other products, they can be gone as soon as we make them available, no matter how much of it we make available. Being honest, providing transparency in regards to our operations and ingredients, as well as the high quality that we provide is the very reason why S.M.A.R.T. Vegan is still around.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.beasmartvegan.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/beasmartvegan
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BeASMARTVegan/
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/beasmartvegan
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BeASmartVegan

Image Credits
Al Torres Photography for the image of us both.