We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Narine & David Semerdjian a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Narine & David, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
Resilience is a form of push back toward a belief. In other words, resilience is developed when you have an expectation to meet a standard, but don’t and further move ahead despite how hard the task at hand may be and against anyone else’s expectation. Including your own!
I’ve personally fought back so much in my lifetime to move past others’ expectations or molds they have desired me to become. It just wasn’t something I agreed with becoming.. And it wasn’t easy to move forward from.
It took me 27 years to see that I was personally living to serve others needs and not my own. To please them for the mere possibility of acceptance.
Mind you I’ve been resilient my whole life, but when my husband pitched the idea that he wanted to start a Sex toy store, I did hesitate due to the fear I would become disowned by our families and friends.
What helped me push back in terms of the fear and hesitancy I had with starting that sex toy store with my husband was that I made it less and less about myself and more about helping others.
It took David many years to get past his fears too. He came from a different place with different forms of fears.
We both have high hopes to help as many men as we possibly can with our sex toy store and sex education, as well as the resources for solid sex educators for men.
Why men? Because they have the least amount of education regarding a subject they want to actively learn and pursue. They lack the best resources.
They also don’t talk much and are lead through the wrong forms of sex ed and often find themselves in troublesome or unhappy relationships.
Where did we get our resilience from?
The pure desire to want to help those we believe need it the most. We made the hardships in getting there less important and believe in the future to develop the best resource for a group of men to become the happiest, most fulfilled versions of themselves.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
David and I were married in 2015 but had a long standing friendship and relationship before that.
We both had this vision that marriage was our happily ever ending… NO ONE talked to us about the difficulty it takes to keep a relationship alive, striving and forever growing.
I personally was noticing that after our wedding we were dwindling down. David’s biggest complaint became we weren’t having as much sex as we use to, and mine was that I felt ignored. There was a lack of intimacy!
His solution was, “if i buy a sex toy, it’ll be exciting and we’ll have more sex again.” Sure it worked for a small amount of time, but the bigger problem was that I wasn’t getting much intimacy, connection, 1 on 1 time. So things went back to the norm of complaints.
We did get into more arguments and it didn’t feel right. It separated us and stressed us out more.
We’re also both very ambitious people and for him starting a sex toy store was pure delight, excitement, something new. He thought if he learned more about it, he’d get more sex. It would bring in variety, action, new excitement.
I knew it went beyond just the object of a sex toy to get that thing we both wanted from one another.
David delved into sex toys and I delved into relationship development. It was clear to see that the missing link was the psychological part of desire and intimacy and the lack of communication. Owning the a sex toy store made BD the perfect reason to develop ourselves and our relationship so we can also help others’ apply it to their own lives.
It’s not uncommon for a man to turn to sex toys to solve his problems. Whether its for himself or to help his wife have better sexual experiences.
Sex toys bring in the interest, the reasons they buy the sex toys develop further into taking different action to be a better lover.
And our mission is to dive further into their needs to become better lovers.
We’re often educating via our email platform and do offer special advice to those who sign up. We’re constantly attending live events and our social platforms (Instagram and YouTube @beyonddelights) is a great resource to learn more from us.
Follow along to hear where we’ll be attending live shows, or teaching intimate classes in the city nearest you.
We do plan on taking things digital in the next year as well with live webinars to help those who are unable or too shy to attend live events.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
In business, if you’re not always learning, you’re dying!
Customer Service
Knowing how to talk to customers, understand their needs, and how to better serve them is the most handy skill to have. If you don’t listen to your customers, know who they are, or what their underlying problem is, you’re never going to be able to serve them properly.
Sales
In order to succeed in sales, you must first know your customer, their pain points and serve them their desires in the easiest way to obtain them, possible.
Without knowing the customer, and how to deliver rebuttals, you’re never going to have sales. You have to know what you’re delivering and how to deliver it so that it positions you as the expert of their problems.
Delivering Value for Free
Most think that getting into business is going to be an easy win because they hear of people coming up real fast, financially. Let the money motivate you to start, but the desire to constantly deliver value to your customer is what’s going to keep them coming back. In order to deliver value, you have to become valuable.
Find out what makes you incredible. And that takes time to develop. The only way you can develop is by constantly doing things to figure out your own hardships. That’s how skill is developed. Once you hone in on your skill you realize your magic power. When you know what that magic power is, you develop it further and just work on that ONE THING to become the best at it. Then things seem to fall into place.
It’s easy to forget this will all take time. Nothing is instant. Develop grit, don’t give up, keep going. You don’t become a great athlete in one week, month year… it takes years of training and mindset development to become someone of expertise.
Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?
Finding the person you want to be like and learning from them in order to become the better version of yourself.
Get out of your regular circle
Don’t be scared to lose friends, you’ll make more
We used to take advice from anyone when we just started. We soon realized asking anyone for advice was “us” looking for a form of “validation” for our actions. We wanted approval for our behaviors essentially.
When you start a business you’re broke, you’re hungry, you’re isolated… You constantly want approval from peers, family members etc.
It’s important to separate from that desire you have to constantly be validated.
Put yourself in a community of like minded individuals. Find new friends who are striving to build businesses. It doesn’t have to be the same industry, just find the like minded person and it’ll help you with your own challenges. And vis-versa… you’ll help them!
There are free communities you can find that bring together individuals. Look to your chamber of commerce, they may have a sector for up and coming entrepreneurs, look to different sources like Y-combinator, or join groups on FB from leading entrepreneurs that offer it for free… Community is what you need to find.
It took us years to find our ideal community and it often started with paid resources, until our finances limited us. Then we got smart and looked into free resources. Those free resources helped us find the right people to connect with and we became friends who help one another out occasionally. The only people we turn to for business advice because they’re also in the trenches figuring problems similar to yours out.
And what helped us the most was knowing exactly who our “Ideal customer” is. Finding where he hung out, how he thought about world topics, their health, where their problems lead, who helps them the most etc.
Once we knew that, it was easy to find the influences “HE” wants to be like. Connect with those influencers, learn more from them and apply what you’ve learned to help your ideal customer with their own problems.
This all takes time to develop and it starts with separating yourself from the familiar pack you grew up with.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.beyonddelights.com
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- Other: We’re often available for questions in our direct chat option from your website. We also are the most active on IG and take questions, comments from the DM offer. Take advantage and don’t be shy!
