What’s next when you’re already a Grammy-Award winning songwriter, Broadway producer, and one of the most famous personalities in reality TV? For ESSENCE Black Women in Music honoree Kandi Burruss, it’s pivoting to the beauty business. “We all have a moment in our life and our career that’s a transition moment,” she told moderator Sophia Dennis.

In a BeautyCon fireside chat on the final day of Essence Festival, “once I say that I want to do something or once I get an idea, I start putting action behind it,” she says. “I’m going to at least try.” Burruss, who runs multiple businesses from restaurants to her beauty brand Kandi Koated and even a sex toy company, has mastered the art of pivoting. 

While she’s been pressured into staying in just one lane, “I clearly don’t believe that,” she says. “I’ve been in so many different lanes.” She first got her start in the music industry  through the girl group Xscape and famously co-wrote TLC’s hit song “No Scrubs.” She says the key to her success was going through trial and error as early as 16 years old.

“The first contract I signed I was too young to sign it,” she says, having to have her mother sign with her. But, “in success, there’s always room to renegotiate.” For her, that doesn’t just mean with money. Over the years, she’s renegotiated her identity, her lanes, and her ventures, all in addition to consistently adding new streams of income. 

But, she warned, be careful who you let manage your success. At around 17 or 18 years old, “our business manager at the time robbed us,” she says. “He took like over $100,000 dollars from our group.” Another time, she says one accountant’s partner even paid his personal bills out of her account.

From then on, pivoting turned into a tool for her success. She says her first career-defining pivot was when her group, Xscape, started having issues. “As a group we were having success, but internally, we could not get along,” she says. She realized she needed to have additional sources of income to fall back on. “I didn’t go to college, I didn’t have a degree to fall on, I didn’t have corporate America to fall on.” 

In 2011, she entered the beauty business with Bedroom Kandi, then expanded into Kandi Koated Cosmetics to offer more products to her woman-dominated space. “As a woman, I know what I like,” she says. Learning not just from  others’ success, but their mistakes, Burruss says it’s important to learn from the like-minded people. 

“Just because you’re poppin’ don’t mean you’re just going to continue to pop,” she says. Her advice on pivoting? “I never get comfortable.”

Author: India Espy-Jones

Read the original article on Essence.