Female Founders: Simone Oppenheimer Mandel and Rachel Segall of NBZ Partner On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Simone: Identify and define your superpower. If someone handed you a microphone, what topic could you talk about for two minutes without any preparation? That’s your business. It’s how we came up with NBZ and how Rachel and I define our superpowers within our partnership. If you find the intersection between something you know and care about, you have the expertise and passion for making people believe in you.
Rachel: Face your fears. Being an entrepreneur requires you to do things you’ve never done before. Simone and I are always looking for ways to level up our business, which comes with fear of change. Luckily, we’ve found ways to let that fear propel us forward instead of holding us back so we can emerge smarter and savvier.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Simone Mandel Oppenheimer and Rachel Segall.
NBZ Partner Co-Founders Simone Mandel Oppenheimer and Rachel Segall have spent decades building brands and driving performance at the biggest agencies in the game. The more they learned the rules of entry, the more the duo wanted to rewrite the playbook for success. So, they transformed their experience into a growth engine that helps small to midsize businesses compete with the big guys. They assist companies in keeping pace in a fiercely competitive market by giving them an ownable brand, a winning growth strategy, and an expansive network.
Simone co-founded NBZ Partner, a growth partner for the marketing industry. With 15 years of experience driving new business for agencies, she helps her clients address their most significant growth challenges to compete for the win. She lives in New York and is the proud mom of ten-year-old Jake and seven-year-old Sophie.
Rachel co-founded NBZ Partner, a growth partner for the marketing industry. With 15 years of experience in branding and marketing, she helps her clients set their businesses apart and capture industry-wide attention. She lives in Oregon and spends most of her free time chasing her toddler, Zev.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Rachel: I never liked having a boss. I always enjoyed figuring things out on my own. It was never about the climb but about the hustle. I got an informal education in branding when I moved to New York at eighteen, working with creative leaders to launch restaurants, nightclubs, and hotels. It introduced me to the power of a brand and its ability to make or break a concept.
The energy of collaboration and creativity attracted me to agencies, where the challenge was taking a creative idea and executing it. I knew how to get shit done and became the coordinator of that chaos. I fell in love with that world and became a natural ambassador for it, telling anyone who would listen why they had to hire my agency for their next project. It’s no wonder that I ended up in the business development space!
Simone: I was never groomed to be an entrepreneur. I met Rachel, took a leap of faith, and it worked out in our favor.
I went to school for acting, but when I realized I’d have to wait tables to make a living, I knew I needed to find a new dream and pivoted to TV production. That first job for Chelsea Pictures made me realize that my network is net worth. For every call I answered, I built a relationship that’s still part of my network today.
Things crystallized when one of the partners started his own agency. I quit office management on the spot and told him to hire me. When he scored his first extensive magazine cover, I sent it to prospective clients and put myself in that new business role. The rest is history!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
Rachel:
I became a mom and founder at the same time. I was sending proposals from my hospital bed as I went into labor! The two are very demanding, but I’m dedicated to both, so balancing them can be challenging.
Simone:
For me, it’s been helping agencies find their superpower. Helping leaders figure out their strengths and weaknesses can be very emotional. Sometimes it takes a deep psychological dive, and we’ve seen senior leaders break down in front of us. There are so many things that block talented people from attaining what they want. The wonderful thing about being female leaders is that we have the emotional EQ to make our clients comfortable enough to open up. We never thought of that as part of our offering, but it’s become a huge part of how we help agency leaders push through their biggest challenges.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you first started? What lesson did you learn from that?
Rachel:
Some of our earliest invoices were humorously budget friendly. It’s clear that we didn’t know the actual value of our perspective when we started NBZ. Otherwise, we would have tripled our previous salaries much sooner!
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a person you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Simone:
Growing up on Long Island, I told my family I would be on Broadway. My dad took me to every class, open call, and audition. He made me believe in myself in a significant way at that age.
Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to getting me where I am today. When we launched NBZ, the first thing we did was call our combined network. People came out in droves to support, hire, and talk about us. Different people will work for you when you focus on your network simultaneously.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects excellent historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience, what is currently holding women back from founding companies?
Rachel:
Women are conditioned to think they’re as valuable as their male counterparts. Corporate culture embraces men, and there are innumerable powerful men in business. For women, there’s a real lack of inspirational role models. The less we see women like us founding companies, the harder it is for us to do it ourselves.
Please help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government to help overcome those obstacles.
Rachel:
The onus falls equally on men and women. Women in older generations are starting to realize that their ideas could have come to fruition much earlier if they had listened to their intuition. They can inspire younger generations to push forward from an earlier age. Because the professional world is still so male-dominated, the men who recognize the importance of change can show their support by investing in female-led businesses.
Simone:
To that end, we need to invest in the qualities of entrepreneurialism from a very early age. It’s great that schools push young girls to think creatively, but they must also learn how to execute their ideas!
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder, but it will be helpful to spell it out. Please share a few reasons why more women should become founders.
Simone:
The world needs to start seeing through a female lens. As women, we have many qualities that make us excellent leaders, from our EQ to our perseverance and ability to multitask. It’s time for us to stop emulating and start recreating so we see how the industry evolves in the hands of female leadership.
What “myths” would you like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
Rachel:
# 1: Work-life balance doesn’t exist. If you see your job as something that brings you joy, your work becomes your life, and that’s ok. It’s not that I don’t have a life. I have a life; a considerable part is doing what I love. It never feels like a sacrifice because I live it and breathe it.
Simone:
# 2: Entrepreneurs are born, not made. I could have been climbing the corporate ladder for the rest of my life if COVID didn’t make me take a leap of faith.
Rachel:
I was lucky enough to have parents who modeled entrepreneurship from an early age. They warned against succumbing to a nine-to-five I didn’t love. I always quit a job as soon as I felt it wasn’t right anymore because I knew I would land on my feet no matter what. That’s also why creating a curriculum around entrepreneurship for young people is so important.
Simone:
# 3: A great idea is all it takes. In the creative environment, we come from, ideas are a dime a dozen, but executing them is just as important. I always tell clients that you must push themselves out of the dream and into the hustle. The dream may get you excited, but the hustle makes you rich.
Rachel:
# 4: You need a college degree to succeed. I was self-conscious that I didn’t go to college until I realized that entrepreneurial skills could be learned outside the classroom. If you can master confidence, resourcefulness, and self-reliance, you’re just as prepared to take on the world as anyone else (with less debt)!
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder, and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
Rachel:
The possibility exists for anyone who wants it. It comes down to where the source of your passion is. When I think about a job, I think about taking out the garbage. When I think about my passion, I think about my work.
Simone:
Exactly. Some people want a job that pays the bills, and that’s fine. Others want to be empowered to execute their ideas. Before we founded NBZ, we had plenty of ideas, but someone else was always in charge of implementing them. Becoming an entrepreneur was about creating something from scratch with all of the blood, sweat, and tears attached to that.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
Simone:
# 1: Identify and define your superpower. If someone handed you a microphone, what topic could you talk about for two minutes without any preparation? That’s your business. It’s how we came up with NBZ and how Rachel and I define our superpowers within our partnership. If you find the intersection between something you know and care about, you have the expertise and passion for making people believe in you.
Rachel:
# 2: Face your fears. Being an entrepreneur requires you to do things you’ve never done before. Simone and I are always looking for ways to level up our business, which comes with fear of change. Luckily, we’ve found ways to let that fear propel us forward instead of holding us back so we can emerge smarter and savvier.
Simone:
A great example of that is the NBZ app, which we’re in the process of launching. Even though it’s connected to the foundation of our business, technology is not an area of our expertise. Is it scary to invest in something new? Of course, but it’s also how we grow our business. If it weren’t frightening, someone else would have done it already.
Rachel:
#3: Find partners with complementary skills. Research shows businesses receive more funding when they have multiple founders with complementary skill sets. No one is bulletproof, but you feel like you are when you’re part of a team that can tackle anything together. NBZ’s mission unites Simone and me, but we deliver on it differently. We can take in a broader range of clients and work by complementing each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Simone:
#4: Your network is your currency of growth. You never know when the intern you gave a pep talk to will become your next client. Make it a practice to nurture your contacts as you grow. We started NBZ by combining our Rolodexes and reaching out to contacts that fit our target audience profile. Half of them ended up hiring us during our first year. It’s incredible what your network can do for your business, and it’s why we continue to invest in ours every single day.
Rachel:
#5: Get your support team in place. Entrepreneurs tend to think they can do it all, but they can only do it with reliable support. Don’t rely on people to help you earn money for free. Invest in high-quality help to set expectations and ensure they’re met. Even if it lowers your immediate profit, consider it an investment in the long-term success of your business. Simone and I aren’t superheroes, but we have superpowers and need time and space to hone them.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Rachel:
We live generously. The industry has been kind to us, and we pay it forward, from introducing our clients to each other to matching talented people in our network with businesses needing their expertise.
Simone:
We democratize the win. NBZ was born out of a mission to be an equalizer for the industry by helping smaller agencies and businesses compete for the win. We’re in a position to do that by passing on the expertise and tools from our holding company days.
Rachel:
The more successful we are in our business, the more successful we are as moms. By modeling the attributes of entrepreneurship, we can give our children the skills they need to succeed in every area of their life.
You are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Simone:
An educational program that prepares young girls to succeed as entrepreneurs in business. When you think about the qualities of female-led entrepreneurship, they apply to many areas in life, from building a business to running a household.
Young girls represent more than half the population, so we need to empower them to see the future through a female-led lens. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what that world looks like!
We are blessed that some prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Rachel:
Oprah is the ultimate representation of resilience and success in the face of unimaginable obstacles. She embodies what it means to live generously by giving back to her community and showing women everywhere that we can be vulnerable and strong simultaneously. She continues to blaze her own trail and is never afraid to be her authentic self. These are the qualities Simone and I try to emulate.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Female Founders: Simone Oppenheimer Mandel and Rachel Segall of NBZ Partner On The Five Things You… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.