Respect Others and Yourself: Advice from Rigdha Acharya

In honor of Canada Day we are featuring Alberta resident, business, and young, female entreprenur! Happy Canada Day! Take a moment to get to know YFE, Rigdha Acharya owner of Get Your Success Now Ltd. since 2008. She shares her journey to entrepreneurship and what she has learned in

What is your business all about? What problem do you solve, service do you offer, etc.
I arrange actionable and easy to maintain small business training courses for passionate entrepreneurs to help them gain the skills needed to get unstuck and make profits. The training topics include skills like are: time management, budgeting, online advertising etc.

What does your background look like? What did you do prior to starting your business? What did you education look like, etc.
My background is engineering so you’ll actually find me bringing in a lot of the engineering design and planning and testing into the work I do. I’ve seen it to be a very effective model for startups and it helps me bring the planner and organizer side of me to help others out.

Why did you start your business, launch your first product, or build that community in the first place? What was your motivation?
When I started my first business which was geared towards college students, I found it very hard to find knowledge that I could act on.

There were so many ideas and theories out there but nothing that I could apply to measure and test. Coming from an engineering background, I find theories are “cute” but ineffective if I can’t solve a problem with them.

And, in talking to other business owners, I found that most people felt lost and confused with too many theories, tips and tactics and not enough action items.

So I started my business with a single mission to provide actionable training to passionate entrepreneurs. It’s a great business for me because it brings together my organization freak side and people person side.

What are your favorite things about being young, female and entrepreneurial?
My favorite part is loving what I do. I’m living life on my terms, doing what I’ve always wanted to do and using what I’m good at to get that done. That’s what makes me feel wonderful.

Do you have mentors or people you admire that you think of when making business decisions?
I work with a business coach and I love it. I’m able to bounce my ideas off and get feedback. I’m able to talk about my struggles and get unstuck so my coach has been really valuable helping me out!

What have been the advantages of being young and female while building your business?
I think everybody can do these but as young female entrepreneurs, perhaps it comes more naturally to us:

Being curious: When you’re curious, you’re always looking for things to learn and trying to figure out how to do things better. That’s a great attitude to have in a business.
Taking risks: As younger entrepreneurs, we can afford to take higher risks and test things out to find something that really works for us.
Having so many people to learn from: I find it amazing that we can learn from people who are way more experienced than us so easily. There’s twitter, facebook, tumblr. Its amazing.

What are the disadvantages you’ve faced, if any?
Sometimes its hard to gain trust especially if you’re working with people in their 50′s etc but it always helps to let them know that you respect their experiences as well as your own knowledge/skills.

What is your advice for a young, female entrepreneur just starting out or in the research stage?
I think its hard being a young, female entrepreneur and one of the most important skills to learn is to respect yourself. This is especially important because as women we often underestimate and short change ourselves because its the polite/nice thing to do.

Now, don’t get me wrong, being gracious and polite is extremely important but you don’t have to downgrade yourself to do it. My mantra is: respect others and yourself.

What is your drink of choice?
Iced tea!