We recently connected with Nikki Jencen and have shared our conversation below.

Nikki , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today 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?

While walking one day with my husband, Matt, we talked about starting a business together. At first, we wanted to start a golf cart business in Carlsbad, but after doing some research, that was going to take a lot of capital not to mention the liability. In June 2021, we had family come to visit us from Wisconsin, and they had requested a beach day.

While there are only four of us in our family, we didn’t have enough beach chairs or stuff to accommodate another family. So we had to buy more chairs etc. The cost of doing so was eye-opening. Good chairs these days are upwards of $80 per chair! That’s when Matt had the idea to start a beach gear equipment company to help others who either have family coming into town like us, vacationers who typically ditch their beach chairs after they’ve used them, or people who don’t have enough equipment or space in their car to host a gathering at the beach. This was the beginning of the idea of Beach 2 You.

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?

I’ve owned three businesses prior to Beach 2 You. I have always been in the online space where as this is the first physical business I’ve owned. I started out in the nutrition industry as a Health Coach, helping women who were first diagnosed with Celiac Disease navigate their way through healing their gut and finding meal solutions. After that business ended in 2017, I went back to school and earned a Master’s Degree in Leadership and Business Administration. In 2018, I started a digital marketing company and developed websites and marketing funnels for heart-centered entrepreneurs. In 2020, that business took a hard hit from COVID and ended abruptly. Since 2021, we’ve started Beach 2 You which is truly a family company as my 17 and 12-year-old help us run it. We wanted to teach our children entrepreneurship skills early in life so they can go out and run their own companies one day.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

As I mentioned before, I’ve owned three businesses. Two of them failed because there wasn’t enough capital to keep them going. Every business I’ve owned has been bootstrapped including Beach 2 You. The timing of Beach 2 You was perfect, as we were getting money from the government to help with the pandemic. We used that money to fund our new business.

There are two ways businesses get into trouble 1) borrowing money that can’t be repaid 2) not investing enough money to keep the business running. We knew we didn’t want to end up in either situation. Our first summer, we earned 7x’s our investment! We kept putting the money we earned back into the business so we didn’t have to take out loans or use credit cards.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

In the beginning of starting Beach 2 You, we thought we would attract a lot of Airbnb, VRBO, or vacation rental owners, but we quickly found out we were really wrong about that. The best source of gaining new clients for us has been word of mouth, yelp, and Google. People who are coming from out of town have been our biggest clientele along with those who are wanting enough beach gear for small gatherings at the beach. Luckily for us, people Google us and find us quickly.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://socalbeach2you.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/socalbeach2you/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beach2you/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/beach-2-you-carlsbad

Image Credits
Storm Photography