Serial entrepreneur and international speaker Kate Hancock is proud of her humble beginnings before becoming known as The Pivot Queen. The mother of two beautiful boys built her four successful businesses from scratch, mostly without any prior experience. Still, she managed to scale them by simply addressing a need she saw in the market. Her first break happened in e-commerce, using a $20 capital she got from selling two products she posted on Amazon. She used that amount to buy packing materials and tape to ship the items she sold. A year later, she grew her online business to a whopping one million dollars in revenue with more than $15 million in online sales.
Kate’s amazing and inspiring story began in Costco, where she worked for a season. She discovered how to differentiate clearance items and started scanning them on Amazon. That day, she sold two items, the same products that would change the course of her career forever. This was the time she used $20 to buy packing items. Seeing great potential in what she started, Kate continued to scan clearance items and only bought them when they were sold. Before long, she found herself purchasing pallets of items for her e-commerce clients. She leveraged her knowledge of what was trending in the market to determine which items to buy and resell.
Her e-commerce business was unstoppable, and it prompted her to hire two virtual assistants based in her home country, the Philippines, to maintain a 24-hour operation on Amazon in 2012. When Amazon started to implement strict measures to protect both the merchant and buyers, Kate also adapted and even diversified into selling other products that she thought would become a hit online.
Knowing fully well that her e-commerce venture would not always be there, she went into a new venture, one that is closest to her heart. As someone who has been plagued by severe eczema most of her life, she deemed it appropriate to develop her own spa that started with only one treatment room. It eventually grew into two full-scale locations, enough to make it to the Inc 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America twice.
After the remarkable success of her spa, Kate took another leap of faith and created a hotel brand starting with only one room. She did this to help the jobless people on the island where she grew up, knowing that an opportunity like that could make a lot of difference in the lives of a couple of families back in the Philippines.
“Everything I do, I start small by testing the market, and if I see traction, then I put gas on it and go all in. If there’s no traction, then I stop and move to the next thing. I try not to waste time and money if I know it’s not going to turn into anything. That has helped me scale in industries I am not an expert in, but having knowledge about what the customer wants or a problem you are solving is the key to success,” Kate shared.
Today, Kate is a very influential figure in the business industry in the U.S. She created a community on Clubhouse that started from zero to 94,600 entrepreneurs globally in just a span of ten months.
She has interviewed incredible entrepreneurs on Clubhouse and now on TV such as the founder of Reebok, Joe Foster, Jeff Hoffman, Verne Harnish, Sharon Lechter, Kara Goldin, Grant Cardone, JT Fox, Daymond John, Arlene Dickinson, and many more.
Throughout the course of her journey as an entrepreneur and The Pivot Queen, Kate has made such a phenomenal impact on the lives of more than seven million entrepreneurs. She has produced the longest-running virtual summit in the world that went on for 85 days 24/7.
Kate’s admirable and inspiring story is worth telling over and over again. She did not have any secret formula. She simply worked hard and never stopped believing that she could do it.
Find out more about Kate Hancock by visiting her website.