Beating the Odds at Building a Million Dollar Business
Kishau Rogers provided the keynote address at the Business @ Breakfast series in her hometown in Lynchburg, VA (hosted by the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance). The talk, titled “Beating the Odds”, highlighted 6 lessons learned over the course of her career as an entrepreneur.
Highlights
The presentation “Beating the Odds: Building a Multi-Million Dollar Business” highlights the challenging entrepreneurial landscape, where only 4% of businesses generate $1M+ in annual revenue, 92% of startups fail within three years, and venture funding for women-led teams remains at just 2%. Kishau Rogers shares lessons from her journey as the first Black woman in Virginia to raise millions in venture capital for Time Study, a tech company supporting over 100 U.S. hospitals with zero customer churn since 2018. Key insights include the importance of a structured process for iterating ideas, prioritizing sales over funding, engaging with the community to learn before building, and accelerating learning for growth. Success relies on building the right team, measuring meaningful outcomes, and fostering environments that enable innovation. These principles showcase how systems thinking and disciplined execution can help entrepreneurs overcome systemic challenges and scale impactful businesses.