4 Badass Boss Babes Every Entrepreneur Should Be Following

Fatou Barry – The PR Girl Manifesto

Fatou Barry created her digital community that focuses on bridging the gap for aspiring communication professionals, The PR Girl Manifesto (PRGM), at the young age of 25 in true millennial style. The business focuses on leveraging intentional design, PR and digital marketing. They provide support to their online community via mentorships, workshops, and digital Q & A sessions. Some of the notable brands that PRGM has been able to support include D'usse, Rocawear, Marc Ecko, & Combs Enterprises.

Her Biggest Struggle in Building Her Business

"The biggest pain-point for me was monetizing the PR Girl Manifesto brand without alienating the initial community we had created. It's now a trend for online platforms to monetize their businesses from the start, but when I started, I was more focused on providing knowledge and resources and less on generating a cash-flow.

8,000 followers later and the addition of employees, I needed to associate a cost to the value we were providing, and had to be very CREATIVE about it. This is where the idea of billable courses, consulting, and PR/Digital Marketing services came in. This allowed me to introduce new facets to the company framework without compromising the foundation that we had garnered so much of our community from."

Sharon Beason - Womeneur

The Womeneur Instagram platform is a curated feed that consists of everything from nuggets of advice, to personal experiences, to tools and resources to support every woman on their grind. Sharon's career began with her holding a coveted, long-standing corporate career as an accountant that she left to take on the many hats of the serial entrepreneur.

The Womeneur brand was born when Sharon noticed a need for authentic, relatable platforms that supported early-stage entrepreneurs. There was an abundance of platforms that focused on material things, often showcasing perfect shoots with luxury bags photographed next to their laptops ensuring that their 'red bottom' shoes would be showing. Scrolling through feeds like this is not only discouraging to a new entrepreneur but misleading as well. Womeneur wanted to reach the woman that was still in the trenches and simply in need of a community that looked like her.

Her Biggest Struggle in Building Her Business

"My initial struggle came into fruition a few months into fostering relations, building, engaging and growing a loyal community. I began fostering online relationships with influencers and people who appeared successful in my industry, and how many of these same people looked, sounded, and dressed alike – very cookie-cutter.

"I was a bit disturbed and concerned because not only was my Womeneur tribe admiring and looking up to the same people, many of them (based on feedback, comments, etc) were struggling with self-confidence issues and lack of esteem, self-awareness issues due to comparison and distorted ideas of what success was. This gave me more of a sense of responsibility and I began to think of ways I could become more responsible.

"I began sharing more of the down-side of entrepreneurship and sharing posts with messages that crossed the lines of what's considered the norm. I also began sharing more of my authentic self by including curse words in my messages. Once I realized you can't please everyone and that curse words don't make someone unprofessional at all, but instead are a form of expression, I began caring less about what people thought. I had to be 100% authentic and genuine and own a strong sense of self-confidence, especially if my goal was to influence others to also be authentic and grow self-confidence."

Courtney Sanders – Think & Grow Chick

Courtney Sanders of Think & Grow Chick is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, new mommy, and rising authority on women's empowerment. Courtney provides online and in-person education, mentorship, and community for millennial women. Her area of focus is personal development, relying on her personal experiences after facing the consequences of poor habits and a lack of discipline when she found herself failing school and in serious credit card debt during her sophomore year in college. After educating herself, she was able to pull herself out of the hole and became debt-free in just a few years. It's safe to say that she definitely is the real deal, as she relies on her vault of lived experience when sharing tips and advice. Courtney has been privileged to be a speaker at The White House and was most recently featured in the October 2017 issue of Forbes.

Her Biggest Struggle in Building Her Business

"The biggest challenge I have had thus far in building my business is just that - building a business! Early on, my sole focus was on making enough money to quit my job, which I think a lot of people desire and can relate to. However, just because you've successfully made enough to quit your job doesn't necessarily mean you've built a business. A business, ultimately, should be an entity that can stand on its own outside of you. As both a personal brand and a new mommy, I've come to realize how critical it is to build something that not only makes money but can make money without you, if necessary. While I definitely have a ways to go, I'm grateful for the progress I've made in this simply by hiring people and introducing business models that can run independent of me. Ultimately, I hope to build a business and legacy that will last for decades."

Tonya Rapley – My Fab Finance

Tonya Rapley built her brand My Fab Finance in 2013, which grew out of her desire to get her financial life in order. She is a domestic violence survivor, entrepreneur, and nationally recognized millennial money expert, recently dubbed the "New Face of Wealth Building" by Black Enterprise. My Fab Finance aims to help others own their power and break the cycle of living paycheque to paycheque, and has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Ebony, Claire, and Ebony, just to name a few. Their Instagram feed will inspire to get your ish together and provide you with tangible daily tips to help you take control of your finances.

Her Biggest Struggle in Building Her Business

"My biggest challenges have occurred when I have grown from one stage of my business to another. Starting a business is easy, but elevating your business can be a challenge for a variety of reasons. Timing, relationships, resources... they are all important and I had to accept the reality that these weren't and aren't always readily available at each phase of the journey."