Elizabeth Dodson is Co-Founder of HomeZada, an online and mobile home management portal that helps homeowners manage their homes to save time and money and reduce stress. Elizabeth Dodson has over 25 years in technology and business development. Prior to HomeZada, she joined Meridian Systems and assisted in the growth of this young startup. As the Director of Business Development for Meridian Systems, she managed the partners, programs, and sales. She holds a BS in Business from Stevenson University and her MBA from Loyola University of Maryland. Elizabeth also offers her experience as an active mentor in programs offered by Stevenson and Loyola Universities, and American Corporate Partners. Elizabeth Dodson also holds an advisory board seat with College Track Sacramento to provide college education opportunities to an underserved market.
After a personal challenge managing her home, Elizabeth decided to build the very solution she needed to save money, save time, and reduce her stress. She never intended to build her company, but she looked for ten years to find a solution that would meet her needs, and nothing appeared. Her frustrations mounted and she had trouble determining exactly what she was spending on managing her home. She struggled with finding the information she needed because it was all over her home. And she could not find effective ways to manage her projects, budgets, tasks, and timelines. So, Elizabeth built her solution. HomeZada allows Elizabeth to track what she owns in a complete home inventory, manage a maintenance calendar efficiently, understand her project spend so that she stays in budget, and have complete awareness as to what her home costs her.
These home management details are important to Elizabeth because she understands that with these details, she can tie this to her overall personal finances. She realized that she was not alone in her need for better home management. Her clients around the world look to manage their homes to make their life easier. Each home is different, and each homeowner who lives in a home is different. By using HomeZada, her clients understand all the details about their homes to make the best decisions for their specific lives.
When Elizabeth is not managing her company, she is mentoring others and providing support to those often overlooked in their efforts to achieve an education. Empowering people to achieve their goals is a priority in both her personal and professional time.
What is HomeZada all about?
HomeZada provides homeowners a complete digital home management system. This includes offering a secure, cloud-based set of apps to track a home inventory, a home maintenance calendar, managing home remodel projects and understanding total homeownership costs with home finances.
With the best tools, homeowners can manage their time and money associated with their homes. This is important to make life easier. Managing these types of details gives us the ability to focus on the home as both an expense and an asset, which improves our financial awareness.
HomeZada also provides its partners in insurance, lending, real estate, and homebuilding the ability to stay connected to their customers in a new innovative format by being present inside HomeZada. By offering homeowners the tools to manage their homes, HomeZada partners gain trust and value with their customers. This results in improved customer intimacy and engagement, retention, and lead generation opportunities for these organizations.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I started my career in the finance and commercial construction technology industries. These industries taught me the importance of project management and finance and their impact on our business lives. After taking these same principles to my personal life, I realized that I could combine these skills to provide valuable solutions to customers.
Additionally, my early career gave me opportunities to work in startups and hold a variety of roles within the company and thus learning how the company was run in its entirety. Collaborating with my fellow employees was also an important part of my roles which brought me to business development. Understanding how partnerships can bring more value to a company and its solutions raises everyone up to their fullest potential. My experiences including understanding the overall business structure and how partnerships work, gave me the confidence to start HomeZada.
My desire to empower others to gain awareness and make the best decisions for their specific and personal needs is what drives me. Giving people the opportunity to manage their largest asset is key to my core values. Building relationships with partners to provide benefits to our mutual customers give us all an opportunity to meet the customer’s needs. This sense of empowerment and community brings value to all the parties involved in the homeownership ecosystem. This makes a homeowner’s journey more valuable and less stressful.
What are your plans, how do you plan to grow this company?
HomeZada has users in all 50 states and in 20 countries internationally. We continue to build relationships with our real estate, insurance, and banking partners that introduce or buy HomeZada for their millions of homeowner customers. By forming these partnerships, HomeZada will continue to grow. In addition, the HomeZada relationship provides our partners with increased retention rates and customer loyalty which gives our partners better results for their bottom line.
We continue to reach out to homeowner clients directly with our marketing and provide them the solutions that they are looking for to manage one or multiple homes. By reaching out directly to our customers, we can determine which marketing messages work and share these same marketing messages with our partners. We gain a better understanding of exactly who are the homeowners that find value in HomeZada.
We also are in a fundraising process to secure investment capital to scale the HomeZada business. Some of our partners have made investments into HomeZada from their venture groups and we continue to fill our round with the appropriate investment partners.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
When it comes to HomeZada, our biggest challenge initially was messaging. We realized that an all-in-one platform to manage your home is a message that works for some homeowners, but other homeowners need specific messages that reflect their stage of homeownership. These messages require a lot of time and content development, making sure we are communicating the best message to the correct audience. This method of multiple messages requires constant measurement and testing.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
Not fully understanding that consumer marketing is expensive was our biggest mistake. Our team worked at other startups, but they were in the business-to-business environment. The knowledge of consumer marketing and lack of funding required us to get creative in our marketing strategies and tactics while also managing our marketing budgets. It required us to reach out and build relationships with our partners earlier than we anticipated.
We were able to adapt our strategy to meet the needs of our partners, but these partner relationships can be tricky if you are not prepared. They require long sales cycles, multiple demos, and multiple touch points within the organization. The time to invest in a large corporate partner can be long but if the relationship is successful, it can change the trajectory of a company. Our team is experienced with corporate sales cycles, but we were not familiar with the residential real estate, insurance, and mortgage industries. This required a lot of time to learn about these industries.
We also bootstrapped our previous startup, so not having a lot of connections in the investment world proved challenging. We still struggle with these challenges, but power through them and make sure we are meeting with investors that find our solution valuable. We also focus on meeting with investors where we fit into their thesis. So, paying close attention to a true fit is important to not waste time for anyone.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
Most homeowners use generic solutions to manage the details of their homes. They use spreadsheets and photo storage sites. They may even use their phones or their desktops to store electronic documents. Some homeowners also have paper details about their homes in multiple locations within their homes. This becomes challenging trying to find the information about your home when you need it.
HomeZada centralizes all this information in one safe, secure platform that can be accessed with any device. Additionally, we have reports that are produced from within HomeZada based on data about your house so that you can make the best decisions for your personal homeowner needs. Being able to empower homeowners with data and reports give our customers complete awareness to what is happening within their home.
This goes back to my core philosophy, give people what they need to empower them to make the best decisions for themselves individually.
What are three resources you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
I would recommend reading as much as you can about the subject of entrepreneurism. This includes building a business, finance and investing strategies, marketing, customer analytics, business development and sales, how to service your customers, product development and enhancement, and much more.
Next, I would suggest that anyone considering entrepreneurship connect with people in their community or network. Ask them what roles they have, how they perform their jobs and what lessons that they learned from their jobs. Listening and learning to ask questions is often a lost art. The people you are surrounded with can provide you with knowledge and lessons that could apply to your business. Even those people who are not in a similar industry. It is important to find the areas that connect with your business needs and provide value to the business you are building. Many of the people in your community can teach you many great lessons.
Find a mastermind support group that you can be a part of. In a mastermind environment, you can explain a business challenge you are facing and then gain perspective and suggestions from your peers. Many times, getting an outside view of what your issue may be, can change the way you approach or solve your situation. People not in your company may have a less emotional stake in your company and then can provide more open and honest feedback. You can develop masterminds with a group of business owners in your network or sign up for one that is professionally managed.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I am pretty good at leveraging my intuition. Some say it is my superpower. But while in HomeZada, for a period, I did not trust my intuition (my gut reactions), and this caused some challenges. I now leverage my intuition to its fullest. And it has steered me into directions that benefit my personal and professional growth. My intuition also has had an impact on the growth of my company.
Suppressing my intuition and second-guessing it does not work well for me. If I knew that I could risk my intuition for even a small period, I would have told myself in big bold letters, LISTEN TO YOUR INTUITION. It will steer you to the best possible path.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Our best marketing strategy was offering different messages to our audience around their homeownership lifecycle. We leverage a lot of different marketing tools to communicate these messages. One of the most effective tools is through public relations. Getting the word out to the press about specific topics around the home helps homeowners recognize what HomeZada can do for them specifically. PR is a successful way we drive traffic to our site and to educate customers what we do and who we are.
Having others talk about HomeZada adds validity to what we are doing and how we are empowering homeowners. Many of these writers share their own experiences using HomeZada. These experiences provide a new perspective of how HomeZada can be used.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
This is a tough one. I would spend it on a domain name and a website and some simple marketing techniques like social media. I would invest my time in building a brand and then securing additional funds to build the solution or product. I would conduct an alpha test to verify that my product is something others want and are willing to pay for it.
I would also invest my time and dollars at events locally that can teach me about the specific roles that I would need to perform (social media training, PR training, accounting management). These are not simple endeavors and using a few of my dollars to teach me to fish will give me the opportunity to do my own fishing.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
If you are required to raise capital, be open to a variety of sources. From friends and family to traditional equity financing. But also look at corporate venture or family offices. There are a lot of corporations who are doing their part to continue to grow their business with the latest technology. These large corporations are also looking to diversify their business which may lead to investments into technology companies. Family offices have traditionally invested in real estate, but they are now more interested in newer solutions and opportunities to diversify their portfolios and to be a part of solving the worlds’ problems.
If you feel like you need to go the traditional route for financing because some book or blog post tells you this is the best method, I say think again. There are a lot of investors around the world looking to make investments in smart people and smart business ideas. Be open to discussing your solution with them. You never know where you will find the money to grow your company.
What is your favorite quote?
My favorite quote is,
“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”
– Neale Donald Walsch
This quote encapsulates an entrepreneur’s journey. You must be comfortable being uncomfortable while running your business. These uncomfortable and sometimes frightening situations help us grow and teaches us what exactly we are made of.
To be an entrepreneur, resilience is a given. These uncomfortable situations remind us about our resilience and that we can get through it. We may need to find a different way, but boy is life grand, and getting lost can be a whole lot of fun!
How can we get in touch with you?
You can visit my company website HomeZada, visit us on social media via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Or you can email us at info@homezada.com.
Tech Entrepreneur: Interview with Sonya Denton, Founder and CEO of weDstll Inc.
