We Caught Up With Ayanna Dutton, The Co-founder Of Non-corporate Girls
Tell us more about non-corporate girls!
Non-Corporate Girls LLC is a podcast and lifestyle media platform built with your professional and entrepreneurial wellness in mind. Co-founded by Ayanna Dutton and Delaila Catalino, the brand empowers communities of people who want to reach their full potential and next steps with digestible content, expert advice and tangible resources. Through their shared vision they facilitate an environment of creativity, cultivation, collaboration and change for the 9-5’ers, 5-9’ers and the intersection of where they meet.
What motivated you to become an entrepreneur?
Non-Corporate Girls started from a space of lacking. As consistent accountability partners for many years, we felt lost in corporate environments that did not truly support what we call our 4Cs - creativity, cultivation, collaboration and change.
Oftentimes being the only women and women of color in these corporate rooms left us frustrated, but most of all lost. We also found ourselves feeling conflicted with our path of navigating corporate when we both knew we had passions outside of that as freelancers and eventually our own entrepreneurs. We knew that we could not be the only people who felt like this and since we could not find a community to support us we felt it was time to create our own.
Non-Corporate started as a vent session that turned into a community of doers, believers and creators who constantly redefine how they pivot in their purpose. We are blessed and grateful to provide a platform to help connect the dots of where the 9-5 and 5-9 meet.
What advice would you give to someone starting out or pivoting their business or their career?
Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. There are hard battles to constantly climb so our best piece of advice is to make sure you are doing it for the love of the art.
Find your passion and run with that. Stay committed, consistent and never waiver because passion is what will help bring you through all those challenges to get to those successes.
How do you push through your worst times? What are some tips on how we can motivate ourselves when we’re not really feeling it?
Anyone who is an entrepreneur knows that you may have more hard times than you can count especially when starting out. We’ve been in business for a few years now and we still feel like we have so much more to go and so much more to do.
We still feel like we are constantly waiting for our 1 year that will take us to the next level, but we keep at it. We remind ourselves that we are not new to this, but true to this and honestly that helps to motivate us forward. We stay consistent to the craft and true to our passion and purpose of why we do this work. We stay committed to our community and how we show up for them and ourselves. We also give ourselves the necessary grace to take breaks when things get too hard and to be okay with pivoting and finding other ways to move our path forward.
The plan we had for the business when we started has changed shape so many times. We are clear that the vision can be the same, but the journey we take to get there will have twists and turns. We get to decide how we handle those situations to move our agenda forward.
