An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Personal support and mentors. You need someone to talk to who has done this before. It’s really hard to be an entrepreneur and you spend a lot of time alone making decisions. Make sure you have a sounding board that you trust.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shannon Vaughn.

Shannon is not a sage, a doctor or an expert of any particular subject. She is a layperson, a woman, an entrepreneur, and a mother. She has learned that it’s not easy to take care of yourself without being armed with good advice, and the tools to do so. She became compelled to share her healing experiences so that others too, could redefine the practice of self-care for themselves, not as an indulgence, but as a birthright. Everyone needs time to unwind and decompress from their hectic lives but few people feel enabled to give that to themselves.

Through her own journey, Shannon has come to deeply believe in the benefits of wellness via detoxification. In 2014, she set out to source the purest and most potent detox beauty ingredients in the world, to formulate them with the most rigorous research, and to deliver them as lifestyle-integrated rituals in the most appealing and accessible forms for modern living…and with that purpose, pursoma was born.

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”?

I often can be heard saying, “I was raised by wolves, wild and ferocious but in a den with a mother that gave deep love”. My mother died when I was young and when she was young; we both lost each other too early. My father was an artist. Life was unstructured — it was really by grace that I had a surrogate mother who stepped into my life and ended up having the most impact on my later adolescence and into adulthood. We fail to remember that we never get to choose our parents (no one does), but I was blessed that my surrogate mother chose me. I was orphaned in many ways and she filled the missing role. I think we can all do that for someone young and seeking direction. Mentoring is a very powerful gift to give to others.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

William Blake, a poet who lived during the American Revolution, gave me my life lesson quote:

“What is now proved was once only imagined.”

When you break it down, something that is proved means others acknowledge it to be true or a fact — it exists in the world for others to see or quantify, meaning that it is absolute. Blake says proof stems from the formless world (aka your imagination) and was “once only imagined”. Think about how powerful the imagination is here; it has the ability to turn a thought or even a dream into reality, and one that includes others who were never part of the origin of that imagining, So when I Imagine something, I get really clear on that, map it out, draw it, sketch it and then make it happen. I think deeply about why I am moving this into the physical world from my imagination. Who does it serve? What is its outer purpose? Is it powerful?

In pursoma’s case, I first envisioned work that inspired me. When I became sick and healed myself, I visualized a wellness company rooted in nature that would serve in a small little way to make the world a better place. From my imaginations, I created an outer purpose to make people feel better, and now here we are 7 years later in a wellness HQ smack dab in the middle of a former cornfield. What’s most amazing is that the imagination not only advanced me in the direction of my own dreams but others too have joined me — that is where the true magic happened.

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?

My mother died of cancer with zero family history of cancer and in what seemed to be the body of a healthy young woman. She was plagued with a disease that spread everywhere, so I started to look for answers. I had no background on the profound effects that stress takes on the body and how the mind-body connection is so closely correlated with disease. The word “disease” indicates that if we are uneasy and have years of stress which we are unable to process or release, we ultimately become sick. I stumbled upon the book Anatomy of the Spirit by Carloyn Myss when my mother was dying. There is a chapter in the book about how women hold stress in their chest, and how prolonged personal stress correlates with cancer. This was my first glimpse into the mind-body connection, and it wasn’t until I went through my own divorce that it resonated. I became quite ill after my divorce and it took me years to develop tools to cope with anxiety and stress. This really was the genesis for starting pursoma — to pursue healing by natural remedies for my body and to walk the mental and spiritual path that has brought me peace and ultimately restored my health.

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?

I always start with imagination. Then, I move to outer purpose versus idea; the idea can be a simple thought, and then it develops into something more detailed, you start to see it and you are enthusiastic, and it becomes your doing because it brings you joy. Not every imagining must become a business. The point is to turn this inner vision into an outer reality. Look at it from an outer perspective to see where it fits, ask for feedback, assess the response and if people are interested. If you see that you are creating something they may not even know they need, you can move forward. I don’t know what “business” really means, but what I do know is that my business is not a hobby. It involved money — losing it, making it, advancing it, trading it.

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 all depends on what the idea is. Not everything is looked at as a business opportunity, but if there’s something similar in the marketplace already, you want to see who is or could be your competition. If you are creating something that fills the market where there is a void, then you should improve on something that already exists and do it better.

I actually did my research in reverse. I had a health issue and looked for and found ingredients that healed me. Having found them, I wanted to produce them at high quality and provide them to others for less money. Deep in the research, I realized I was actually in the bath salt business and that put my competition into context. We shifted from a cult classic single serve detox soak, to a brand that competes with the epsom salt market. Epsom salt (which is not from the town of epsom as the fabled story goes) is just a man made, chemically produced, low quality salt compound. The market has touted this as good for you. Yes — soaking in hot water is good and adding magnesium is good, but epsom doesn’t compare to real mineral-rich salt harvested or mined from a seabed. Natural ingredients offer healing benefits no different than swimming in the sea.

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.

I can only outline the way I did it which was very much not the traditional way. The ingredients that helped me to heal my ovarian cyst were so effective that soaking in those ingredients improved not only my physical condition but also my mental health. I slept better and had less anxiety. So my steps were:

• Find the best ingredients.
• Source them myself to guarantee the quality.
• Build direct supply chain relationships with farmers.
• Set up a manufacturing operation to control product formulations and efficacy.
• Package the product so the consumer can easily use the product and experience it the same way I did.

You want to practice these steps on yourself before offering the product to the consumer.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

1. If you are a female-founded or female-owned company, you will need extra support if you have a family and children. Even in 2022, our society is not set up to have women lead companies. You will require extra support from your household and team.
2. Funding! Women in finance are the minority. There is less funding for women and there are fewer women in funding positions, so make sure you seek advice. It’s hard to run a company without the necessary funding. I began with no funding and secured small investments over time, but my company saw slower growth because of this.
3. Choose your team thoughtfully. Make sure there are people on your team that know things that you don’t know and find people that support the vision but are really good at what you are not.
4. Personal support and mentors. You need someone to talk to who has done this before. It’s really hard to be an entrepreneur and you spend a lot of time alone making decisions. Make sure you have a sounding board that you trust.
5. Take care of your physical and mental health. You have to be healthy because the work is nonstop, even on weekends and holidays. When you are sleeping you will be thinking about your business, so it’s essential to make time to take care of yourself.

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?

Ask your friends and family if they would use it. Find out what is similar and see if you can get feedback from people using that type of product. Conducting a micro internal focus group can be very helpful.

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?

I personally am unaware of this, but I do know it’s helpful to talk to a patent attorney because they can define whether or not you need to have a patent or could qualify for one, or if you are just upgrading something that already exists.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

I don’t think you know in the beginning, unless you come from a finance background where funding is always the first step. If you don’t, there has to be a tremendous amount of your own effort and usually some (if not all) of your own money in the beginning. Then It’s like dating — some things fit together, some things don’t.

Your financing can be just the cash needed, or it can be a really helpful partnership. Either way, it needs to be a fit in terms of what you need at the time and what they provide. Finding funding is very hard and listening to the news and reading other people’s stories of how they raised X for X is often deceiving because you don’t know the back story. Funding doesn’t mean that success is guaranteed in the long run. I am opposed to the built-to-flip models, but there are alot of them out there. The VC community is interested in one thing: your exit plan. I have no idea how you build anything solid when you are only focused on how you get out of it. That’s like asking for a pre-nup in the first minute of a first date. My intuition is to say “hey let’s build something beautiful here first, and when we have to get it all on paper let’s think about that structure more”. The first step should be to build something with love and good intentions.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I would like to think yes. I’ve shared my personal story of a health crisis that led to deeper healing and building business that provides products that are easy to use, and can improve daily life. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the process of meditative bathing done at home each evening is a way for me to disconnect from the digital world, ease stress, and sleep better. If others practice that, it can bring more joy and a sense of calm to their lives, and I feel that always makes the world a better place, one bath 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.

MEDITAITIVE BATHING! It provides a digital detox. “Taking to the waters” has been a term used for centuries; the practice of human beings going to take baths outdoors in mineral-rich waters in nature as a way to heal, relax and rejuvenate themselves has been a healing practice for centuries. In today’s modern and more urban lifestyles, most of us do not have access to a mineral hot spring in nature, but we do have bathtubs in our homes. The addition of pure mineral salts and healing aromatherapy can mimic the calming effects of nature and mineral bathing. Introducing meditative bathing into your at-home mineral soak is a mindful way to offset the impacts of daily stress and create a way to release anxiety.

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.

Sara Blakely — founder of Spanx

Michael Acton Smith, Alex Tew, and Tamara Levitt — the Calm app founders and narrator

Haley Sacks — aka @mrsdowjones

Snoop Dogg

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

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Making Something From Nothing: Shannon Vaughn 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.