Tori Molnar is a 17 year old entrepreneur, speaker, and blogger for the Huffington Post and ToriMolnar.com. At 13, she founded Utoria and is now building another start-up called Bars & Bites. She’s fueled by her love of entrepreneurs and also helps a limited amount of small businesses grow through consulting and marketing projects.
At 13 years old, I spoke on stage for the first time. At 14, I stood on the newsroom floor at CNN for the first time. At 15, I gave my first keynote address in front of more than 1,000 CEOs. Today, at 17, with the help of Fiverr®, I’m helping other young women start their own businesses.
To give you the backstory, I am an entrepreneur, professional speaker, and blogger for Huff Post as well as for my own site, ToriMolnar.com. At 13, I was inspired by a book called “Miracles Happen”—about how Mary Kay Ash started her not-so-small empire—to start my own direct selling company. We called it Utoria.
Utoria was fresh, unique, and innovative. We focused on creating a salesforce of young women and taught them how to be actual entrepreneurs, not just how to sell a product. We also didn’t make our own products. Instead, we sourced them from small businesses all over the country. Our focus became quality products, from quality people, with quality stories.
But I was also 14, and I started getting a lot of attention from the press and well-known entrepreneurs. After six weeks of being in “soft-launch,” the company almost imploded—too much demand and not enough supply. I was forced to close shop and rebuild from the ground up. Which brings me to now.
- I’ve learned a lot of lessons over the past few years, but here are the main ones:
- Even if I didn’t have to rebuild Utoria, I wasn’t ready to be a leader at 14. The need for high-quality and EFFECTIVE entrepreneurship education is real and vast.
- The only reason I’d chosen to start a direct selling company in the first place was because I thought that was the best possible way for me to help girls start businesses, which is my true passion.
- Last, but most important, it’s okay to be grassroots. I thought I had to go from being Tori Molnar the 14-year-old girl to Mary Kay Ash the legend overnight, but legends aren’t made overnight, and what I’m doing right now is going to make me legendary soon enough.
So the past three years have been a huge blessing, but there was one pesky little thing that always held me back from changing the world: MONEY. So what do you do when you don’t have venture capitalists or a trust fund to start with? You go grassroots and hustle.
Utoria just relaunched with a series of BYOB (Become Your Own Boss) events where we help young women go from idea to profit-ready business in a day. Because most of the girls wouldn’t have been able to afford the price of a ticket, I asked the network of entrepreneurs I’ve built over the years to sponsor a girl to attend. Sponsors get some marketing perks and a chance to give back, a girl gets to start a business, and they both gain this new meaningful relationship—it’s awesome. The girls then just have to pay a small confirmation fee and they’re in. The admission includes pre-work to clarify their ideas and vision, the action-only event day agenda, and four weeks of one-on-one follow-up mentoring with me.
My vision for the events really came out of a huge frustration I’ve had for a very long time. I was tired of being in build mode, tired of not helping girls start businesses, and tired of never having enough money to finish the project.
BYOB meant that I got to get back to what I really loved— helping young women chase their passions and become financially free in the process. It also meant funding to push into finishing what Utoria is about to evolve into, an entire online educational community, a publication, and soon, once again, a direct selling company.
I created the BYOB curriculum around everything I’ve learned about starting businesses. We have a pre-event questionnaire to get the girls thinking about their ideas and the business model. The event is divided into three parts: learn, plan, and execute. These parts are pretty self-explanatory. We learn what we need to know for launch, work on basic business plans, and then we sit around a big table and work on getting as close as possible to launch. Afterwards, during follow-up mentoring, we constantly improve on what we’ve done since then.
When I embarked on the journey to build and execute these BYOB events, I (and Utoria) had nothing. No assets, no website, no money. We really had nothing to work with except for a few big ideas and some pretty cool connections. (Amanda Steinberg of The DailyWorth personally sponsored a girl to attend in Philly.)
We needed a place online to collect payments and market the event, so I built torimolnar.com. When you go grassroots you get creative. If you look at my Twitter account, you’ll notice I display proudly in my bio: “built a website using just Shopify, Fiverr, and coding.” Thanks to Fiverr, along with Shopify, my initial ToriMolnar.com site cost only $30 to launch. Seriously, that’s it.
Then I thought, “Wow, if I could build a website for $30, any girl can!” So I approached Fiverr and Shopify about my idea for BYOB, and guess what? They both loved it and committed to backing our first two events in Tampa and Philly. I think it was a perfect partnership for everyone, and the Utoria Girls benefitted so much from the tools.
One Utoria Girl created her logo using a Fiverr Gig®. Another ordered a cartoon of herself for marketing. One girl, who was just 13, even ordered a video intro for the tutorials she posts on her YouTube channel. It was invaluable for these teenage girls to upgrade their businesses in BIG ways for $5, $10, or $20 at a time, but I would expand on that and say that it is invaluable for ANY entrepreneur hustling to grow a business. It’s sure been helpful to me.
At the end of the day, our first two BYOB events were simply experiments, and extremely successful ones at that. In total we helped 10 girls, who ranged in age from 13 to 30, start incredible businesses in two cities. The girls traveled up to four hours one way to join us, all thanks to Fiverr, Shopify, and all of our amazing scholarship sponsors who helped get them there.
We learned so much from the experience and are excited to continue the momentum through the rest of the year. We’re bringing on some interns for the fall and planning the next BYOB events. We’re also enhancing the BYOB experience in a number of ways and making it accessible to even more girls.
BYOB is getting ready to take on Boston, DC, and Atlanta during our fall tour, and I’m looking forward to continuing our amazing collaborations with Fiverr and Shopify! We need entrepreneurs to sponsor our new Utoria Girls, so if you’re interested please contact me, or visit my website.
I’ll leave you with this: Don’t ever think your dreams are crazy or impossible. Anything is possible with a plan and some hustle, especially with amazing tools like Fiverr at your fingertips.
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