Is it TMI for entrepreneurs to air their private business?

Making It Work is a series about small business owners striving to get through tough times.

Hakki Akdeniz, the founder of the Champion Pizza chain in New York City, speaks freely about his past. When he first moved to the United States from Canada in 2001, he was homeless, sleeping on subways and in Grand Central Terminal before spending three months in a shelter.

The experience of Mr. Akdeniz is featured prominently on the website of champion pizza, and the company’s commitment to supporting the homeless is key to its mission. Mr. Akdeniz, 43, is part of a growing group of small business owners who are incorporating some of the most intimate aspects of their personal lives into their company’s brands, according to experts and business observers.

Company founders telling their personal backstories is not a new phenomenon. These stories are often simple, rosy accounts of a determined person trying to solve a problem. But a new generation of founders stand out with stories that aren’t one-size-fits-all, easy-to-digest stories about how their companies came to be, experts say. They include stories of homelessness, addiction, incarceration, mental illness and physical health.

Many small business owners say they choose to be transparent about a difficult time in their lives and, in turn, build a deeper relationship with their consumers. But what happens when companies reveal some of the darkest moments in their founders’ lives? Will consumers relate to or be put off by too much information?

In recent years, more and more small business owners have revealed sensitive details about their past in corporate communications, said Tulin Erdem, a professor of marketing at New York University Stern School of Business and the chair of the university’s marketing department. Dr. Erdem said it was a “positive trend” that could encourage a connection with customers, as long as it was genuine and relevant to a company’s product or service.

“Some people won’t like it,” she said, but added that those who don’t like that probably aren’t the target customer.

Angela Lee, a Columbia Business School professor who teaches venture capital, said she, too, had noticed more founders opening up about past issues. But she said business owners “have to be careful” when it comes to oversharing, especially when it comes to complicated topics. She said, “Nuance is hard to convey when someone is quickly scanning a biography or a social media post.”

Ms. Lee is also an investor and the founder of 37 Angels, a network of female investors. She said the lines between people’s professional and personal lives are becoming increasingly blurred and founders need to be forthright when pitching to investors because their past can fade into the background. reviews. “The days of one person at work and one person at home are behind us,” said Ms. Lee.

The “About Us” section on a business website is used to differentiate a company by explaining what it does better than competitors, said David Gaz, the founder of the Bureau of Small Projects, a branding agency that also develops websites for small businesses. companies make. The agency found that the “about” page was the second most visited section on a company’s site after the home page, said Mr. Gas. (The company builds about 100 small business websites a year, he said.)

Mr. Akdeniz’s biography is posted on Champion Pizza’s website, but he stressed that it was not the intention to put himself at the center of the brand. “I want to be an example to many people, but not stubborn,” said Mr. Akdeniz, who is Kurdish. He often gives slices to homeless people who visit his pizzerias and volunteers once a week at two organizations that support people who are homeless, by donating pies that he serves himself.

Originally from Turkey, he arrived in New York as an asylum seeker after being deported from Canada because his tourist visa had expired, he said. He had learned to make Italian-style pizza in Canada, where he lived for several years, after mastering al lahmajoun, a Middle Eastern flatbread with meat, in his home country.

He eventually found a job as a dishwasher in a Hoboken eatery, before making his own pizza in restaurants, and in 2009 he opened his first store. EB-1 green card, which is given to those with “extraordinary ability”, after earning the highest overall score in a 2010 pizza making contest by Pizza Marketing Quarterly, an industry magazine, at New York City’s Javits Center.

There are 33.2 million small businesses in the United States, according to the Small Business Administration, and numerous owners have most likely gone through rough patches — the National Institute of Mental Health estimates”more than one in five American adults lives with a mental illnessFor example. Historically, most have not publicly disclosed these hardships through their business platforms, said Dr. Erdem, the New York University marketing professor. But some who do find that their personal stories resonate with their target consumers.

George Haymaker, the founder of Remember ice cream, is one of these entrepreneurs. Mr Haymaker, 62, described a period of drug addiction in his life as “circling down a toilet drain”. Eating large amounts of ice cream played a major role in Mr. Haymaker’s early sobriety, he said, and it helped keep him away from drugs and alcohol.

This experience is an integral part of his company’s identity: “ReThink Ice Cream was born out of my addiction to alcohol and painkillers,” reads the first line of the “The Story” section of the company website. He had gained more than 30 pounds when he first got sober, so he developed a healthier ice cream recipe with less sugar.

“Whether there’s a stigma attached to addiction or mental health, I don’t care,” said Mr. Haymaker, who lives in Northern California. He said his message of recovery resonated especially with colleges that have the mental health of students. He now sells ice cream at 30 colleges in California and one in Oregon, as well as retail outlets, and has lectured on recovery and entrepreneurship on campuses.

Alli Ball, a nutrition consultant based in San Francisco who advises start-ups selling packaged foods and beverages, said there are no hard and fast rules about what founders should or shouldn’t talk about. “If it’s a gimmick, it hasn’t really shaped you and you’re just doing it to make a more compelling story, I think people can see through that,” she said.

She advises clients to be upfront about their values, explaining that this can attract the kind of customers a company wants to attract.

One business owner determined to be forthright is Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of August, a start-up that sells feminine hygiene products. Her company, which sells products online and at some Target locations, allows consumers to create their own personalized packs of menstrual products for home delivery.

“My whole brand has been unfiltered from the start, talking about periods and blood and mental health,” she said.

Ms. Okamoto, 25, said she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder six months after she came up with the idea for the company. She shares stories about her mental health problemsincluding one in which she said she had been sexually assaulted, on her Instagram and on TikTok, where she has more than four million followers. She acknowledges that her approach is not for everyone.

“I wouldn’t say there’s a significant marketing incentive,” said Ms. Okamoto, adding that if there was any benefit to August, it came from creating genuine bonds with her followers.

She said her openness on social platforms had led to a sense of loyalty among many of her clients. But she admitted that her candor can provoke judgment, cause some people to be more careful of her and even repel others, adding, “I get a lot of hate online.”

Meg Smith, the founder of Love Lexi, a lingerie company that specializes in smaller cup bras agrees that customers value transparency. “Consumers are so smart these days and they care about authenticity and genuine motives that brands have,” she said.

Ms Smith, 38, said she developed an autoimmune disease after getting breast implants and eventually had to have the implants removed. She said plastic surgery was taboo in the community where she grew up, outside of Portsmouth, NH, and that she was initially hesitant to talk about her cosmetic surgery and health issues for fear of judgment.

Finally in a video on the Love, Lexxi website, she shared that she wanted to feel beautiful after struggling with her body image and health. In hindsight, she doesn’t regret sharing, she said, because her story reveals the honest motives behind her business.

Ms. Smith said her transparency for the company shows: “Our founder had gone through the wringer.”

Jailed entrepreneurs said sharing their past could put their professional reputation at risk, but some said it would have been worth it. When Marcus founded Bullock Flikshopa website and app that allows people to send postcards to loved ones in prison, he initially kept his own experience of imprisonment a secret in 2012.

“I didn’t want to be banned from business,” Mr Bullock said.

He spent eight years in prison, starting at age 15, for carjacking, and for the last six years of his imprisonment, his mother sent him a letter every day. This inspired the idea for his company, whose mission is to end recidivism by helping people imagine life after prison through letters from loved ones.

After a customer expressed how meaningful the app had been to her family, Mr. Bullock decided to share that he understood where she was coming from, having spent time in prison.

“I felt empowered by owning, fully owning, a story I walked away from for so long,” said Mr. Bullock, who lives in Washington, DC. Ultimately, he hopes being transparent can help destigmatize assumptions about formerly incarcerated people. .

“Our customers were shocked to learn that the technology they used every day was started by someone like their loved one in one of those cells,” said Mr Bullock. The Flikshop website said the service is active in more than 3,700 correctional facilities. He has since hired and created other formerly incarcerated people Flikshop Neighborhooda project that connects organizations with people behind bars and informs employers about drawing up a recruitment policy to give people with a criminal record a second chance.

For Mr. Bullock and others, including Ms. Okamoto, opening up about their personal lives led to a sense of liberation.

“I’ve been hiding so much of myself for so long,” said Ms. Okamoto. “It would take more emotional energy to filter myself and think about who I’m talking to and how I want to appear.” She added, “So I might as well just be myself.”