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

Maria, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

For anyone working on a startup or new business, landing your first paying customer is surreal. I recall calling the team into a meeting to announce that we had a client interested in hiring us. This was the moment when all your hard work finally paid off and you felt a great deal of satisfaction. By defining our Ideal Customer Profile on Linkedin and ensuring consistency on one social media platform, we connected with their executives, which paid off, as we focused on enterprise customers and connected with them through Linkedin. As our sales cycle took some time, we signed up our first client in about two months. When you’re building something new and looking for proof of concept with your market, getting a confirmation for a contract is the most exciting moment. With our first client, we went all in and we continue to deliver value to our customers today.

Maria, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Utility Junction is a technology company committed to making utility billing easier, more affordable, and more productive for our real estate, property management, and homeowner customers.

We’ve been in the property management industry for 15+ years and serviced other real estate investors with utility management. In March 2020 when Covid hit we found ourselves losing our biggest customer and realized we had an opportunity to further evolve our business from utility management services to create a one-stop shop digital platform for all your utility needs. It has not been an easy journey, as any entrepreneur can testify to but it has been a very rewarding one, with a valuable lesson learned and incredible relationships made along the way.

In today’s digital world, managing essential utilities is still quite painful, having to navigate service provider platforms, understand your consumption, educate ourselves on reading bills, paying bills on time, avoiding late fees, reconnection-fees, etc. The process of connecting, transferring, or disconnecting essential services can vary by state, city, and zip code, it’s definitely not a streamlined process across service providers. Information about processes and resources is available but they are scattered across multiple platforms and offline resources.

Our goal at Utility Junction is to simplify this process for our enterprise customers and in the future for everyday consumers, as well. Essential services are necessary for our day-to-day lives but we usually don’t put too much thought into them we just pay the bill. We believe this should change and we can do it by implementing it with technology and expert know-how from the comfort of your smartphone.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Your business will run much more smoothly if you commit to a vision and embrace the role of a leader as a servant.

I believe we are all in the people business; without the people around us, we would not be where we are today, and scaling a business is impossible without them.

I wake up every morning and push towards our business goals because of my team, they inspire me to be the best I can be.

My experience has taught me that finding the right people to join your team is essential, those who embrace the vision and become an integral part of it.

We work effortlessly as a team because we are all aligned with our business goals. Of course, we still face challenges, but with the right people at your side, it’s so much easier to overcome them.

Showing vulnerability and the fact that you don’t always know everything helps maintain an open, transparent, and positive work atmosphere.

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

I am a type A personality who strives hard to achieve my goals.
I’ve always been a go-getter. Having grown up achieving academic excellence and learning to do things on my own, I believed that if you want something done right, do it yourself.

Once I realized I needed to unlearn it, I changed it to “don’t
go alone if you want to go far”.

My journey to become the best version of myself began a decade ago when I embraced personal growth and began developing leadership skills.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/esteladuartel/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/m.estela.duarte
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariaesteladuarte/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/M_EstelaDuarte