Entrepreneur advice from a mom who built a million-dollar business

ElizabethEntrepreneur

Julie Berninger, 33, has tried many a side hustle. She’s kept a blog that’s brought in thousands of dollars per year. She’s had a podcast that, though was never an income stream, enabled her to meet hundreds of side hustle and financial experts. And her Etsy store, where she sells items like bachelorette party activity lists, brings in $1,000 per month in passive income.

After years of dabbling, it occurred to Berninger that she could teach some of the side gig lessons she’s learned. In 2019, she teamed up with fellow hustler Cody Berman, and the two founded Gold City Venturesa business of online courses focused specifically on building additional streams of income.

The two started with courses about freelancing, blogging and opening an Etsy store for printables like the one Berninger has. The latter has been their most popular course by far, and in 2021, Gold City Ventures brought in $1 million revenue.

Berninger, who lives with her husband and daughter in Massachusetts, quit her job in July 2021 to focus on the business full-time. Here’s her career advice for other entrepreneurs.

Work in corporate America

Berninger spent years working at companies like Amazon and MetLife. She recommends any entrepreneur spend time working in corporate America before diving in. “You’ll learn so many skills that really carry over to your own business,” she says.

Berninger served as a project manager at some of her day jobs, for example. “You learn how to work backwards from an end result,” she says. “You learn how to make a timeline, and you also learn how to manage resources.” The latter really helped in building out her businesses. Whenever she had a budget, she’d use it to hire freelancers to take on some of the workload.

“Whatever career field someone’s in, you

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Why This Entrepreneur Went From Farming Pigs to Making Vegan Bacon

ElizabethEntrepreneur

Entrepreneur Eben Bayer grew up on a small family farm in Vermont where he helped raise and kill chickens and pigs. Now, his passion for solving the world’s biggest problems has turned him toward disrupting animal agriculture, with a hyper focus on Replacing pork bacon with a vegan version made from mycelium—the fast-growing root systems of mushrooms.

Bayer is best known for his company Ecovative, which employs the magic of mycelium to create sustainable solutions to problems such as plastic packaging, leather production, and building materials. Ecovative’s products have been widely used by major clients such as IKEA. Last year, the company began working with PVH Corp.—the parent company of fashion brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger—to replace both plastic-based vegan leather and animal-derived leather with its environmentally and animal-friendly mycelium leather.

VegNews.EbenBayerHeadshotMyForest Foods

Bayer was inspired to start Ecovative during his time at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where late professor Burt Swersey pushed him to identify the most pressing issues in the world and then develop technology to solve them. However, the entrepreneur’s upbringing kept him from thinking about mycelium as a solution for the environmentally destructive animal agriculture industry … until now.

“I had a blindspot around food. I moved away from eating meat completely in my own life but had this view [about] beautiful animal agriculture and how it’s not so bad,” Bayer told VegNews. “I got hit on the head twice from my friends in the sustainability community. Once about how animals are horrible for the planet when they are farmed intensively from a carbon standpoint and then twice, when I finally looked into factory farming. This was nothing like the pigs we raised in Vermont.”

These realizations pushed Bayer to expand Ecovative with a food arm, MyForest Foods, under which he launched MyBacon, a vegan bacon

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