Coltrane Curtis has always remained at the forefront of style and business. After starting as the first style VJ for MTV and VP of marketing at Marc Ecko Enterprises, Curtis branched out on his own and became founder and managing partner of Team Epiphany in New York.
Since 2004, Team Epiphany has grown to 80 employees and branched out with a second location in Portland, Oregon. During the first Tanqueray Trunk Show in New York, Curtis discussed the secrets behind Team Epiphany’s success.
How did Team Epiphany get its start?
To be frank, after MTV, Team Epiphany was the party team in Miami that turned up and threw parties. That was my goal. Then it turned into us having great brands. Ten years later, I get an opportunity to do amazing things with somebody I’m married to and a staff with people that I love. It’s about being passionate about what we do and loving who we do it for. So Team Epiphany is just a sum of everyone’s efforts. I tend to get a lot of the credit and I don’t really deserve it nor want it. But it’s a team of people who are just incredibly talented, smart, young, individuals who without the agency would never be together working on a project.
What are the biggest challenges of being an entrepreneur?
The business challenges, then and now, is finding clients. Finding brands, finding people that really want to do the things that they say they want to do. We want to win. I want the basketball game to be over in the first quarter and put the rest of the bench in the second quarter. We want brands that embody that same mentality. So if you want win, you want to win big, we’re your shot. That’s us. We’re very competitive people and very smart and culturally savvy people.
What advice do you have for future entrepreneurs?
Most times people hire people that look like you, that know what you know, that have access to what you have access to. That’s not really the best relationship. You want to find people that are complementary and are good at what you’re weak at and vice versa. Together you become strong. We’re 80 people deep and we’re just getting stronger because we’re always adding people to the matrix. We might have an administration team where everybody is good at something different, and you put them together and you got a creative team. One of those people individually isn’t a team. So it’s more about creating those networks, bringing people together, and creating amazing, effective work.
