Marina Furstoss

I would attribute my success to being a go-getter person and a self-starter. I feel like it really shows in my entrepreneurship journey. I was able to transfer a lot of the skills I learned in my corporate career to my own business, and I do feel like it is a big advantage, especially when talking to different entrepreneurs from different backgrounds. I can very much see how my corporate career impacted my entrepreneur journey in a good way. I'm very much a go-getter - if I don't know something, I'll find out how to do it, and I'm trying to be really patient with myself. Some things you're not going to get from the first try, but if you're staying consistent and if you are trying and trying again without giving up, I feel like that's where you get the success from. It's that resilience and just believing in your vision, believing in your practice. One other thing that's somewhat different is that I feel like people who start a business from purpose and from their personal practice, from something they're really passionate about, you can kind of feel the difference from people who are starting just to make money versus something that actually drives them. That's something I practice almost every day, and it's something that I consistently practice with my own products now, so I feel like I'm always getting new ideas, how to improve things, what else should I do. Having this as a regular practice myself gives me a lot of insights of what to do next.

The best career advice I've received recently was from the Poppi founder during a webinar with my female entrepreneurship group. She mentioned that a lot of founders right now care so much and spend so much time looking for influencers or other people to talk about their business, and they spend most of their energy and money on it. But her advice was that you are your biggest advocate. Social media is hard, but if you want to have a successful business, if you want to know how to talk about your business, you actually have to do it yourself and focus on being your best advocate yourself versus finding people to talk about a product that you don't know how to talk about. In her example, she said that when she started Poppi, she was just posting on TikTok constantly and connecting with people, and that's what got her all the celebrity endorsements - Kylie Jenner and Hailey Bieber posted about Poppi for free, pretty much, just because she believed in the brand, she posted about it, she had so much passion talking about it, and she created that community where people were just drawn to it and talking about it because they liked it, versus getting paid to talk about it. I'm trying to adapt this mindset and make sure that I'm the one who communicates why this brand exists, what benefits you will get, and in general, communicating my vision. It's definitely hard and uncomfortable for most entrepreneurs who aren't trying to be influencers, but I really love this advice and I feel like it makes so much more sense than trying to find someone else to sell the product for you. You should be the one who inspires people to buy without paying them.

My advice is that you have to be passionate about what you're starting and what you're doing, and not as a trendy thing. It shouldn't be something that you started like 6 months ago and then after a year you're tired of it and you don't have that passion. I feel like it's something that at your core you believe in, and that's what gives you energy to continue whenever things might not be as smooth as you wanted them to be. Just having that more consistent passion and making sure that what you're talking about, what you are doing, is aligning with your life vision and not just a temporary phase in your life. I would recommend people explore and make sure they're starting in a niche they're actually seeing themselves in the next 10 years or so, because a lot of the time, success doesn't really come in a few months or even in a few years. You should plan at least to spend maybe 5 to 10 years in that niche and still be into it. Something that keeps me going is just because I'm so passionate about this cause. I've done it for a long time and I'm planning to do it for the rest of my life, as of now, unless something happens. Just having that aligned with your core values would make things easier.

I would say that sauna, while it's pretty trendy right now and became more trendy in the last 2 or 3 years with more and more studios opening up, people are still learning about sauna culture and sauna etiquette. A lot of other countries in Europe, both Western and Eastern Europe, have been familiar with sauna and they know how to sauna from childhood, versus in the US, I would say it's more of a growing industry and people did not have this experience, so they learn from scratch. The biggest challenge is that while people like this as a habit, a lot of people are still not properly educated on sauna etiquette or the right way to sauna. For example, a lot of people still go in the sauna in workout clothes, and that's something that is very well known in Europe that that's not what you do. Workout clothes have a lot of toxins and forever chemicals that can leach to your skin, and you're there to detoxify, but if you're not aware of that or didn't research this in advance, that seems more of a norm in the US right now. People know about the benefits but they don't know the right way to do it, so the educational piece is one of the challenges. That's something I'm hoping to do more of with my company, making sure that people are getting the most benefit out of the sauna and not damaging their health when they're trying to improve it. For example, with my sauna hats, a lot of people in Europe are familiar with the concept, but it's definitely still very new for the US market. People don't know why people are wearing it or what's the benefit. If you go to the sauna often and you don't protect your hair, your hair will dry out eventually. It's not the same as using hot tools every day, but if you are going 3 to 5 times a week for a prolonged period of time, you will start seeing the effect on your hair - it drying out more, having split ends, and heat effects. A lot of people don't think about it until they have that issue, so I'm trying to proactively warn people about it and make sure if this is something you want to be consistent with, you protect the things that matter and get the best benefits without the bad effects of the sauna if you're using it wrong.

I think authenticity and honesty are most important to me, and I feel like I'm learning that it's not a default value. There are a lot of businesses out there that kind of make up stories just to sell the brand, and to me, authenticity and honesty and coming from the place where you want to make a change are very important. I feel like I could never be in the vape business or something, you know, something that I would be selling that would essentially worsen people's lives or play on their weak side. To me, I want to create practice or products that would impact people's lives in a positive way, and it's really important to me. Another value that I take very seriously is that we all have answers, basically, to everything. All the questions we might ask, we all have answers, and it's important to give yourself a space to find them. A lot of times people look for answers in other places, other people, other sources, but I do think that the whole secret of life is that you need to be in such a good relationship with yourself that you just know what to do. You need to develop your intuition, believe in yourself, and be more in tune with your inner world. Right now, in the conditions where we are always distracted by social media, everyone has ADHD, everyone wants to do a million things every second, it's important to find time just to decompress and be alone with yourself and be comfortable with being alone with yourself.