165: Danie Spikes (Beloved, Inc.)

Danie Spikes on Innovation City

“The need to seem perfect. The need to always have to be winning or be successful to be valuable, to be seen, to be important. None of that really matters.” – Danie Spikes

Welcome to Season 3 of Innovation City, a podcast featuring innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in cooperation with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community. Venture Cafe is the largest combined gathering of entrepreneurs and innovators anywhere in the world. Events are held every Thursday in St. Louis, Miami, and other leading innovation cities around the globe.

Today’s guest is Danie Spikes, CEO of Beloved, Inc., a fragrance house and body care brand she leads with her husband, Stephen. Danie is a relationship coach, public speaker, and award-winning businesswoman. In this episode, Danie sits down with the team to discuss how her fragrance journey began, the relationship between self and others, learning to let go of control, and much more!

They discuss:

• Danie’s passions surrounding love and relationships
  • The connection between relationship with self and relationships with others
• Authentic relationships
  • Reconciliation of self
  • There is no one finite definition of a happy relationship
• How her life’s work began before she was really even aware of it
  • She’s always loved fragrance
  • She was mixing and blending her perfumes as a 6-year-old (and getting in trouble a lot!)
• Danie’s non-glamorized experience at the bottom and her journey from there
• Danie and her husband discovered a need for massage oil candles for people with sensitive skin and Beloved was born
• This involves lots of research, trial and error
• The processes and challenges of starting and quickly growing a business
• The conversations she’s had with buyers, investors, and sometimes they overlap
• Learning to relinquish control is a difficult lesson to learn as a leader
• Cultivating trust
  • With people she advises
  • With investors
  • With people around her
  • Trusting in God
• Finding support in life and in business
  • Looking to people who are “so far ahead”
  • Also looking to those who are up and coming in business
• Get in touch with Danie: watch her Tedx Talk, visit www.iamdanispikes.com, Instagram @lovecoachdanispikes,
• Visit belovedbox.com and get 10% off your first order with code: LOVE

Lightning Round:

1. What can you do that you could not do a year ago?
   • Cry openly
2. Where have you found peace?
   • My bank account. And in my friendships.
3. How are you making a difference in this world?
   • I remind people that even though someone who’s never met you can hate you, someone who’s never met you can love you.
4. What do you spend too much time doing?
   • Looking at my bank account. And creating fragrance.
5. What do you want to let go of?
   • The need to always be perfect, winning, successful, to feel valuable or important.