Confessions from a Social Entrepreneur: What I Did to Stay Afloat and Launch My Creative Ideas

How I launched bold ideas with no budget—and how you can apply these lessons to your own transition too.

Photo: TawaUStock

 Originally Published 3/18/23. Updated 12/10/24.

Many years ago I had to close a nonprofit organization I had founded and ran for 12 years due to the recession and difficult fundraising climate.  It all happened pretty quickly and we had 21 days to close everything down. 

Although we had a super successful 12-year run, it was an incredibly sad and stressful time, to say the least. There I was, suddenly collecting unemployment, with only a few thousand dollars in my savings account. I had absolutely no clue as to how I was going to make money.
 
I knew working for myself was the route I wanted to take, but I had zero extra money to invest in any kind of business. I needed whatever little savings I had to supplement my unemployment compensation and cover my monthly expenses.
 
So, here’s what I ended up doing to stay afloat.

Sold Small Assets

At the time, I remembered my mom saying something about how the price of gold had skyrocketed in the past couple of years.  I had never sold something like jewelery, but was curious about whether I could get any money for the remaining pieces of my jewelry sets - backs of earrings from my high school days, a broken gold chain, a black pearl necklace, earrings I had bought on a trip to Hawai’i but never wore.

I ended up taking a little sack of miscellaneous pieces to two jewelry shops to see if they would buy them. The jeweler also bought the pearls and the backs of my gold earrings too. I walked away with over $1,000. 

The key strategy here was selling items with gold in them, as the current market value of gold had gone up significantly.  Back then one could expect to get 80% of the market price for gold from a gold buyer. 

In hindsight, I had a lot of things taking up unnecessary space in my drawers that I could have sold, but my mismatched jewelry made the most sense. It wasn’t very usable but it was worth money.

Consigned Items
 
During my initial year on unemployment, I also ruptured my Achilles tendon. (That’s another story.) So not only was I unemployed, I was unable to drive. I know. Losing.  My parents had to come from out of state to tend to me for a month because I couldn’t do much on my own. And so began my mom’s cleaning frenzy.

Not only did my parents complain about all the “stuff” I had in my closets, each day I’d wake up to find my mom cleaning out one of my kitchen cabinets. She would pile things up followed by piercing questions like, “Do you NEED this?”  I’d nod my head, defending my favorite frying pan with all my zeal. And then she roped my dad in it too. He was convinced I needed to get rid of everything in my apartment.
 
I was annoyed, but decided I needed to reframe quickly.  This was not an annoying and invasive visit from my parents, but an opportunity to make space for new energy to come in by moving old energy out.

As a result, I got rid of all the clothes I hadn’t worn in the past few years.  Luckily, living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am surrounded by all sorts of cool consignment shops.  I took my clothes to one shop and earned almost $90 just from that trip - $90 more than I had before the cleaning frenzy!

I’m a firm believer in making physical space for new ideas and dreams to manifest. I am also a fan of the quote “we are burdened by our possessions.”  It couldn’t be more true.  Cleaning up and consigning left me with the space I needed to create, craft and build from a clear space. This goes for furniture, household items, rugs, antiques, or whatever else might have been taking up space in my living quarters. 

Liquidated Larger Assets

For most of my adult life, I’ve been surrounded by entrepreneurs. And I can tell you firsthand, we take risks. And, sometimes we end up contorting ourselves like a pretzel to finance them.
 
I remember listening to the founder of my favorite ice cream company in the Bay Area tell his story about having no money when he wanted to start his company. He liquidated his retirement and took a loan from his family to start. He took a huge risk; everything was on the line for him. At one time his ice cream was in every major grocery store in the Bay Area. Today, it’s not.

During my time of transition, I had launched two ventures. The first was a culture change platform called brown girl surf and the second was Surf Life Executive Coaching, my coaching practice.  I didn’t have much of a retirement savings from having worked in nonprofits for 16 years prior, but I made the decision to liquidate equities to keep me afloat during the years I was trying to bring these ideas to life. I knew I could make the money back, and that taking the money out of my retirement and putting it into my ideas would help accelerate them more quickly.  
 
Over a four-year period, I liquidated almost 40% of my retirement and sold several stocks, half of which went to finance surgery after breaking my ankle at a surf contest while representing team brown girl surf. This caused me to cancel a coaching retreat I was hosting in Hawai’i due to the injury, losing out on all income from that event.  S*!# happens.
 
In hindsight, if I had a choice, I would not have taken money out of retirement. That money would have compounded and grown substantially over the past 12 years. But I did not have much of a choice, especially given my injuries.  

Negotiated and Downsized Fixed Expenses

I used to be the executive coach for a bootcamp focused on supporting executives in transition. These were all director and C-level folks who were out of work. We used to encourage them to call their cell phone and insurance company provides, and any other businesses where they had monthly, fixed recurring payments in order to negotiate a new rate. 
 
During my start-up transition, I was able to talk to customer service at my cell phone company and let them know I was thinking about leaving for a carrier with better prices. They reduced my monthly bill and gave me more minutes. I also called my auto insurance company to make sure I received all possible discounts.
 
I put all of my fixed expenses into a grid and tackled them one at a time, trying to figure out any possibility of lowering my bills. I asked myself questions like: Do I really need that subscription? I got tight fisted with money going out since there was little to none coming in. These recurring expenses are like apps running in the background of a phone. You don’t see them, but the money is going out the door, until you stop it from doing so.

Volunteered My New Expertise

I’ve found volunteering builds relationships and trust, and gives me an opportunity to help others. It’s also a great way to get exposure to a business, project or challenge so I can determine whether this is a space I may want to work in the future.

When I started my coaching practice, for example, I would freely give coaching sessions with absolutely no agenda in mind. I loved to practice my skills and witness transformative moments in the lives of others I coached. And slowly, the very friends I had coached for fun started recommending me to their friends. 
 
One time I gave a free, hour-long coaching session to a friend of mine while walking on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. A few years later, she ended up getting a job in an architecture firm. They then hired me to coach all the principal architects. Had I not coached her pro bono, she never would have reached out to me for that opportunity to serve her firm.
 
I learned giving away your skills leads to visibility and building relationships. And perhaps it might lead to building a future pipeline of clients. 

Budgeted

Whilst on my nonprofit sabbatical a few years prior, I learned to budget very well. Since my income was limited during this time, I had to be really conscious about my spending.  By the end of my travels, I was pretty much surviving on ramen noodles and eggs as my daily diet, which was just fine for me. 
 
I continued to budget carefully, even after I arrived home. I separated my fixed expenses from my variable expenses in an Excel grid. I kept track of every single cent that went out the door. I knew exactly what my monthly cash flow looked like. It’s tedious at first, but it’s totally empowering. 
 
All of this was in addition to the given of running through my modest savings in the first year of my transition, which I needed to do as I had fully ruptured my achilles tendon while making an influencing video for brown girl surf at the gym.
 
To date, I’ve been working with entrepreneurs now for over 25 years. I like to think of us as masters of financial patchwork. Most of us don’t have one comfortable source of funding. In fact, if we were comfortable in all this, it might short circuit the very neural pathways needed to fire in order to get us to bring our ideas to life.  I learned comfort is never really your friend in bringing ideas to life. Grit is.
 
For me, realizing my ideas has not just been about the glory, but it has also been about pain, personal sacrifice and risk, be it financial, physical or emotional. But that’s also where the grit lies too. Figuring out how to piece together the financial puzzle to enable your ideas to come to life is like the tetris in social entrepreneurship. And it makes a world of difference if you actually enjoy playing the game.       
 
Have you ever been in my shoes?  Are you in my shoes right now?  What are some of the strategies, tools and resources you used to stay afloat?

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Farhana Huq is an Executive & Leadership Coach, Surfer, Global Explorer and Founder of Surf Life Executive Coaching & Brown Girl Surf.