Job. Or fill a big order. Or expand your office and take on whatever comes next. For those who always find new ways to grow their business, American Express open proudly presents your business on msnbc. Hi, everyone, im j. J. Ramberg. Welcome to your business, the show dedicated to helping grow your business. One of my favorite segments is our makeovers where we get to dive in with a team of experts to turn things around for a struggling Business Owner that asks for hem. We got an email from a woman named nailah ellisbrown. She wrote because she wants to grow her company into a national brand. She needs help to do it. Nailah told us she is absolutely determined to succeed in this business or die trying. After spending the day with her, i believe it. We decided to give her a your business makeover. We are here in detroit because of a letter we received from nailah ellisbrown. She started an Iced Tea Company eight years ago. While shes seen success, the company is not where she wants it to be. She let us know, she needs a your business makeover. Lets go meet nailah. Nailah . Hi, j. J. So nice to meet you good to have you. 29yearold nailah is a 29yearold detroit beverage entrepreneurer. She started the Company Eight years ago brewing tea in her mothers house and distributing it out of her car. Now, she has her own bottling facility. This is it . This is where it happens . Yes, this is my operation. We do not use tea syrups or concentrates. Once we get it to the right color, we take the herbs out and add the sweeteners. Shes taken a treasured family recipe, developed by her jamaican grandfather. He served this brew on the black star line passenger ships back in the roaring 20s. Today, she sells it as ellis island tropical tea and in several Retail Locations like whole foods and meijers and more to come. I have business in airports. I have a distributor as big as u. S. Foods. When you give the list, it sounds fantastic. Its brought her lots of attention. She was on forbes 30 under 30. Shes had a number of national and local tv appearances. Looks like everything is going great, so, why did nailah write to us. If you had to measure her business on a scale of uhoh to this is amazing, where does it fall . The first third of near uhoh. I think there are issues based on my conversations with her that need to be addressed. Arthur is a beverage expert that helped grow brands. We asked him what he thinks of her company. If this was your business, would you throw in the towel . I might. It could be fixed, but requires a lot of fixing. Thats why we are here in detroit. Arthur said there were a whole bunch of issues and none of them came as any surprise to nailah. The first, packaging. We took her to her local whole foods to check out the tea display. So, all these brands are local. It doesnt pop. The label is not serving its purpose. When you are on shelf next to 30 other iced teas, 100 other beverages, you have to pop. I need help with my packaging. I need a lot of help. I have no idea what im doing with that. Then theres the distribution. Right now, ellis island tea is in 300 stores, including whole foods and krogers. That sounds impressive. While its a nice start, its nowhere near where she needs to be. The threshold of when a beverage brand becomes profitable is probably after say 15,00020,000 stores. So, its a long road. Whoa its a very long road. Each distributor is a world of its own and all operate on different, unique systems. So, i need help with figuring out how to grow within those channels before i lose the accounts. That lack of distribution causes a third problem, price. When her volume increases, her cost decreases. Right now, she doesnt have that luxury. So, looking at the larger market, my price is always way higher than everything else. Its 3. 99 for a bottle. Thats extremely high for a readytodrink iced tea when you can get a comparable product for maybe 1. 25 or less. So, right there, she has a challenge at the shelf. And maybe her most telling challenge of all is this, after nearly a decade of building this business, her takehome salary is still zero. At eight years in, not paying yourself a salary, yet, living off your husbands salary and that getting tricky, have you thought, you know what . I gave it a good run, time to close up shop . No. Thats not closing up shop is not an option for us. Theres no plan b. This is it. Quitting is not an option. I dont want to come off aggressive, but, yeah. By the way, you dont come off aggressive. It takes that kind of attitude to get you through tough times. It will take me dying to give up on this company. What does your husband say about this . Hes rooting for me, but, at the same time, bills have to be paid. We put the same question to her that we asked arthur. If you had to judge your business on a scale from uhoh to this is fantastic, where would you be . Thats hard to answer. Its both at the same time. Its we might have to close these doors next month, but then its like, theres opportunities. Theres cocacola, possibly, theres u. S. Foods. This is so the story of an entrepreneur. Its either going to massively fail or we are going to be hugely successful. Right . Its an emotional roller coaster. This is a critical point. Make it or break it. This is just the beginning. We are going to get experts to come in here and take a really hard look, right . Really say, what is this going to take to make this work . Im very excited about that. Well be returning to detroit with our experts to help nailah reenergize her business. Lets turn to people that know about branding. Jeffrey hayzlett is het head of the group and peter shankman. Good to see you both. Good to be here. You just saw that piece. Tell me what you think. I asked her and arthur, on a scale of uhoh to this is amazing, where does it fall . Its double uhoh. It is amazing. I love her. This is where the real future is reading the tea leaves. If you dont make a profit, you cant keep the business going. Stop kidding yourself. Dont spend your husbands money or familys money until you can prove you can make money with the product. If you cant make money, shut it down. What do you think before i chime in . Im on the same page. At the end of the day, if you are not generating revenue to continue, you have to ask yourself, if im not, why arent i . If i change that, i need to do that. If i cant change it, it might be time to cut. Thats what i saw. I want her to succeed, i do. A great product, but 3. 99 a bottle. I love root beer and bacon, i will pay, but not everybody has the money to get it over and over. She has to find the right people. Shes in a part where shes generating enough money to keep the doors open. Shes not taking home a paycheck, the business is still running. She still has ideas. She knows these are problems. So, when you still have ideas and still potentially see a path to get there thats the thing. Instead of figuring out the next 20 things to launch, its great to run a business. No, im running a business, but not taking a salary myself, thats not going to last forever. Right. Thats not really running a business. Thats staying afloat. Its a hobby. Tough get to the next point to turn it into a real business. They pay employees, pay you. She needs to put time in. By this day, im going to do this. She thooz reduce the costs. You can still sell it at four bucks, if you can get people to buy it, good for you. Look at taking down the distribution and concentrate just on whole foods and sell at every flea market and craft fair to cut my costs. Thats market seg menation. Id go to whole foods. Wla i would like to see her do is if shes going to the craft markets, its a bargain of two. Look at two segments to sell to in two ways. Well, we are going back there in a few weeks. We are going to bring back our experts to turn this company around. Wish her the best of luck. Would you like to have a your business makeover for your company . We are going to let viewers decide who has the next one. You need to submit a 60second pitch video of why your business deserves to be selected. Send your video to us yourbusiness msnbc. Com. If you are in retail, you know this feeling, you see people walk through the door, look around and then walk right out without ever buying anything. It is incredibly frustrating, but, theres a bit of science to changing this. One boutique owner in geneva, illinois, was intent on figuring it out. She hired two retail experts to come in and mix things up in a way to result in more sales. In 2010, sherry opened peaceful parlor, an ecochic boutique in geneva, illinois. The story is now the goto for locals looking for a custom blend of tea or environmentally conscious gift. She wants to expand. With hundreds of tourists expected to come to town for an annual festival, she hopes to convert visitors into return customers. She called in someone to get the store ready for the influx of new customers. Thank you for coming. A challenge is we have people that come in, make a loop around and walk out the door. If you have people walking in, making a loop and walking out, they dont understand what you sell. All the things that make you different, we want to help you get started. Ready . Sure. Lets go. Sherry, this area is important. Its a keierre ya and needs to stay open. Okay. The first five feet, square feet inside a door is nomans land. Anything you put there, people wont see until they are at least five feet in the store. Thats where we stop. This open space allows them to slow down. You are not giving people enough space to walk in and actually take in the breath of the product you have. By the time they hit their feet in the door, they are almost hitting this table. What im seeing, its almost like a tidal wave of merchandise. What i mean is when i saw those, when i first walked in, i had no idea what they were. Creating a way to not show so much, but tell stories and have a sign that explains it. From that display, i d not understand these are head bands. We need different levels. If we are going to show this many bright colors and groupings of colors, separate them enough so the customer understands this is not just this folded. What is in the back in these rooms . Okay. Right there, we have our kids room, then over there, we have house wears. Question, how do i know that . I have never been here before . We are interacting with the folks, greeting them, say hello, check out the kids rooms or step into the other areas. We need to talk about signing for the entire store. You cant be everywhere. Signing is critical for customers. Women rely on it, men depend on it. Especially in a store like yours, you have so many unique items and stories to tell, you need to tell people, this is what this is, this is where we are. Constantly, as we go through the store. Dont use all capital letters, you want upper and lower case. Its hard for older eyes to read upper case letters. Take the average age of your oldest customer and divide it in half. Thats the smallest size font you can use in store signing. Oh, wow. The prime item that draws people into the store or that you are known for is tea. One of the things we do here that is different is we hand blend the teas. We have a working station here so it fits to have the tea back here as far as logistics for us to move things and package things. Lodgistically, it makes sense. Could we bring some of the teas to the front of the store. Major location and minor locations. We need to use the minor locations showing items. With a laundry list of changes to make, they got to work getting the store ready for the first day of the festival. The next day was the big reveal. All right, we made a couple changes. It looks fantastic. We gave you the five feet of space here so people have a chance to walk in the store and have more room to shop. We took your table that had the to toys underneath and brought this on top. You have multilevel. Its easier for people to shop, to see. We cross merchandise, still. Its easy to understand how this is. Now, its time to put the changes to the test. All right. What did we learn today . We learned that when customers walk in the front door, because we gave them extra space, they felt more comfortable shopping. Not only did we s that, we watched evybody go with the flow. We created this path, came to the right. Looked at the focal wall. Instead of seeing a radiator, they saw a product, handling it and talking about it. On top of that, they looked at the tea and started talking about that. That drove them farther into the store. The third thing, wow, she had a lot of jewelry. We actually took jewelry away from the space. Because of how it is merchandised, less of a display is more. Great Contact Marketing is about the right mix of strategy, creation and distribution. When you get it right, it is a win win. Entrepreneur magazine gives five great tech tips on content marketing. One, do your research to create strong data driven content, you need to know what influences your customers. Tools like make my persona and a who knew who customers are and how to become their purchasing journey. Two, pick up on trends. Google alerts and google trends track whats drawing the interest of customers. Clear voice help brainstorm and track the competition. Three, time to create. Use google docs and create pinterest boards. Sales and marketing like hud spot can help with blogging and social media. Four, distribute through social media. They can help you better engage your audience. Post with meaning and think of social as collective to engage customers. Five, syndicate your content. You dont always have to invest in new tech. Syndicate content through linked in polls to reach your audience. When we come back, Chelsea Krost motivated millennials and Scott Harrison, the founder and ceo of Charity Water on what your company can learn from his fast growing and inspiring nonprofit. Will your business be ready when growth presents itself . American express open cards can help you take on a new job, or fill a big order or expand your office and take on whatever comes next. Find out how American Express cards and services can help prepare you for growth at open. Com. What are some tips to help identify talent and then motivate talent for Young Millennials that are coming out of college where a traditional bonus or pay structure might not be the only thing theyre looking for . Leadership is so important. It all starts at the top, and it trickles its way down to your employees and your interns. If your leader is passionate, is collaborative, allows for millennials to voice their opinion, voice their concern, think outside of the box, be a part of the creative, you will see millennial employees be that much more loyal to you and avoid that jobhopping stereotype. Almost a decade ago, i learned of a nonprofit called Charity Water. Soon after, i started hearing about them from lots of people. That organization seemed to be on fire, and i was incredibly impressed. Well, today im even more impressed, because ive been kind of watching it from the sidelines, and its still around, it is still growing, and it is still doing things so differently than so many other organizations out there. I figured there must be something that we can all learn about how they stood out from the crowd, so i went to talk to the founder, Scott Harrison, about how he did it. It was liberia in 2005. New york Party PromoterScott Harrison decided to take a year off to take a humanitarian trip. He came home forever changed. I couldnt believe people were drinking dirty water in this day in age. I came home, you know, shouting from the rooftops, this is crazy what ive seen. A billion people are drinking dirty water. This shouldnt be. That was the beginning of Charity Water, which is helping people around the world get access to clean water by building wells all over the globe. Its one of the Fastest Growing nonprofits with a track record many forprofit companies are looking at in awe. Weve given 7 Million People access to clean water, funded 22,000 projects that will help 7 Million People across 24 countries. Last year, they raised more than 30 million. They have more than 2 million loyal followers on social media and Companies Like google and caterpillar are bending over backwards to help them. Whats the secret . How has Charity Water succeeded when so many others have faltered . Scott says it all starts with a fierce commitment to staying true to your principles. I mean, ive always believed that more important than what you do is how you do it. I think weve had many opportunities over the last decade of Charity Water to compromise, to take the easy way out, and we really try to hold ourselves accountable. It sounds simple, but its not. His unwillingness to waver on this point almost did the company in many times. Charity water promises to give 100 of their donations to finding safe water solutions. They have an entirely separate fundraising account for overhead. At one point, he had millions of dollars in the bank to build wells and only 881 to pay for the overhead. Luckily, a lastminute donor saved the day, but this test set the stage for how scott would always run the organization. Today, as always, he believes in 100 transparency and sharing the organizations mistakes has only made his community more loyal. In order to win trust, you had to be straight with people. And you could share your successes, but you also had to share your failures. We once broadcast a live drill from the Central African republic, where we failed. In short, the sand started caving in and the well collapsed. Why werent you afraid that donors were going to look at that and say, okay, i just spent all this money to get that rig there, and it didnt work, and what a waste of money, im going to put my money somewhere else . Because life isnt perfect. People want truth. They dont want a glossy they dont believe the glossy perfection that so Many Charities or so many businesses present to the world. I think they like things that might have a few warts on them. Its not only donors scott has attracted, but topnotch employees, people who could easily get higher salaries and stk options elsewhere. He does that by making innovation a key element of how Charity Water is run. We run this place like a startup, you know . People walk in the office, and they feel like theyre at google or square or twitter or spotify. We have dashboards with metrics. And finally, scott sa