An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
You can’t cater to everyone — As much as your business idea is to cater to a massive group of people there will always be a percentage of individuals that still won’t like your business concept or model no matter how influential the business may be.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kayla and Kourtney.
Kayla and Kourtney are two sisters that both graduated from CSU Northridge with a Bachelor Degree in Communications and they’re both mothers. Kayla and Kourtney’s father Kederio is the founder of Goal Achiever Inc. a business dedicated to helping others and giving back. Their story was inspired by their late cousin Terri Large who passed away at the age of 18 years old due to a rare brain cancer. Terri’s vision was to help those in need. A decade later Kederio wanted to carry out Terri’s vision and help a massive number of individuals by hearing their inspiring stories and helping them achieve their goals. Kayla and Kourtney have been honored to be working side by side with their father and to take charge on getting 1 million goal setting individuals across the United States to be a part of an inspirational movement “Goal Achiever 1 million”.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
We had an amazing childhood, we were born and raised in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. Our parents were the youngest homeowners on our street San Dimas Lane, we enjoyed being outside, swimming and doing everything a kid at our age would enjoy doing. We had good grades in school, played sports mainly basketball and traveled a lot with our basketball team. We grew up in a two-parent household and consider our cousin Terri Large (who passed away due to cancer) like a sister. Terri and Kourtney were only 4 months apart while Kourtney and I were 2 years apart, so we were all close.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Stay Focused” … this quote came from our cousin Terri Large. While she was in and out of the hospital doing chemotherapy, she always remained focused on school and her family and act as if the chemo was irrelevant to her, because she had other plans and goals to do so much for herself she couldn’t let cancer be her main focus. I (Kayla) remember Terri calling me when I was in college at CSU Northridge and asking me if I was getting ready for class, at that time Terri was bedridden and her body had given up to the point where she couldn’t walk nor take care of herself. I aways wonder why she was so concerned about my studies, but it dawned on me, she wanted me to “stay focused”. To stay focus on the things I can control and achieve and not letting small or big situations distract me even during her health decline she made sure I stay focused. I (Kourtney) remember Terri being my biggest cheerleader and motivator. She was my biggest critique, but in the same moment my biggest fan and she pushed me in ways that I didn’t even know I could push myself. Terri dealing with cancer only pushed me to go harder, stay focused and accomplish more than I set for myself if that was playing sports, my education or life in general. Stay focused is a life lesson quote that we always stand by, thanks to her.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
Honestly reality and Terri’s story made a significant impact on us. Her story from dealing with cancer from the age of 10 up until 18 was eye opening for us both. There is a small 2 minute clip of her detailing her scholarship award from Kettle One Vodka and her excitement during that small clip just shows she was ready for life to begin, even while dealing with cancer. Terri’s ability to carry on despite what she was battling has resonated with us in many ways as women in business, mothers, sisters, daughters, and our personal friendships.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
How to overcome this challenge is to simply believe that your idea is worth putting out there to the world. Once you believe in yourself it becomes a feeling that only you can stop. Face these challenges upfront and know that you may have some doubt, uncertainty and fear but remember a toddler fear nothing when they are getting into everything, they just have a concept to just do it, think as toddler and just do it until it’s done.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
It’s always good to research to find out what others may me doing that is similar, but I (Kayla) learned something sometime ago that stuck with me. “If everyone was selling white T-shirts on different corners, you’d think by you selling the same white T-shirt wouldn’t give you any results because other people had that idea first, but what you don’t know is that your white T-shirt may be priced lower, your white T-shirt might fit better and you may have better customer service selling the T-shirt. So never sell yourself short because someone else came up with an idea before you, just learn new ways to sell it”.
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
First — The idea is written on paper, taking every idea, and writing it down is the foundation of the new business.
Second — Share your idea and bring on a team, allowing others to help you on the developing side, editing, creating, designing etc. Your team could be people you know or look into freelancers that specialize in the field of work you are looking for.
Third — Build it, bring light to your written idea, and create, modify, and structure your business model.
Fourth — Launch it, start with your family and friends, word of mouth to get your business idea out there locally. Except feedback good or back so you can make necessary changes.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?
- Not everyone is on board — Close friends or family may not always be your biggest supporter even when you think that they will be. It will be that random person that you least expect to really support and motivate you on your business endeavor.
- You can’t cater to everyone — As much as your business idea is to cater to a massive group of people there will always be a percentage of individuals that still won’t like your business concept or model no matter how influential the business may be.
- Not everyone will understand your company idea — Our company wants to help millions of individuals set goals and share inspiring stories, while we give back to scholarships, school donations and charity. We thought the concept was simplified, but some people still don’t understand it even if we broke it down word for word.
- People will think you’re trying to take from them — Goal Achiever Inc. gives back, we do weekly cash reward giveaways on Thursday’s , we also had a April Savings Challenge to help individuals save and if they saved the amount of money per our calendar we were going to give back an additional cash reward for them saving, some people thought we were doing a bad deed or would say “I don’t need to save I have money”; our goal was to help those save and we did receive good feedback, but the negative feedback was shocking because what’s bad about saving and giving back?
- It’s easier to manage a large group than a small group — Our founder has ran/owned multiple businesses and he would quote “it is easier to manage a large group of people than a small group of people” not quite understanding how that could be true, but we faced this theory…kinda. A small group of people can all fall off at once leaving you to handle everyone’s position. We are a small company for now, but as the CEO and VP we must wear many hats in our company to make sure things run smoothly even with our small team.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Research if the product has been invented before. If so, see how they built it and launched it. If not, decide who your target audience is for this product. Why would someone use it? How can they use it? What’s their pain (learned this from someone) the pain is why is this needed for anyone, how does that benefit them (i.e Goal Achiever Inc. allows members to set goals on our platform, why is this relevant to anyone? because those that write their goals down have a 42% chance of achieving it, so now we tap into the pain of a person that has troubles achieving their goals because they aren’t writing them down)
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
It depends on the invention you are looking to develop. Many entrepreneurs sought out to create businesses without seeking a consultant and just taking their idea and building onto it, AKA our father. In some instant a consultant is needed because you may not know where to start and we will be discussing this a lot on our podcast “Entrepreneur Talk” asking question on how that business owner started their business and did they seek any additional counsel to get it started.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
It really depends on the business endeavor and what the company’s goal is. As for Goal Achiever Inc. we are using our own funds to develop our business, but we also seek sponsors to help our business grow and to give back to scholarship awards, school donations and charity. We would recommend doing both if you can, one way may work better than the other.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
We are just getting our feet wet, but as of today we have given away cash rewards to participating members that have set goals and our first scholarship award in the amount of $500.00 to a Senior student that will go towards his college of choice. We will continue to do what we were at sought out to do which is to “help others” and hopefully our movement will contribute to making the world a better place one day at a time
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Goal Achiever Inc. our movement is to inspire others and to help them reach their goals.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Honestly, we couldn’t narrow this down to just one person, there are so many inspirational leaders, entrepreneurs and those that started ground up businesses just like ours. If this could be seen by anyone that has started from where we started, we’d love to enjoy a private breakfast or lunch with that individual and to really pick their brain and how they started, challenges they face and their inspiring success story.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Making Something From Nothing: Kayla and Kourtney Of Goal Achiever On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
