Ep. 152 - Guest: Pageant Planet founder Steven Roddy

This is the FCB Podcast Network. This is Spacies Pass. Hi, everyone, and welcome into another episode of Backstage Pass. It's your host here, Victoria Elizabeth, and we are here with the founder of Pageant Planet, Stephen Roddy, at the Beautiful Virgin Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. Stephen, how are you tonight? I'm awesome, Victoria Elizabeth, how are you? I am doing just great. I'm even better now that I'm here. I mean, there is a banquet being set up, a red carpet. This is a fabulous event. Tell us a little bit about this Pageant Planet gala. What is this all about. So it's really a gala that's designed to celebrate the industry, and it's a time it's basically the Oscars, but for pageantry, okay. And so it's a time where we can come together and we can celebrate who did have the best dress of twenty twenty four and who was the best coach, and who was the best hair and makeup stylist, and who had the best pageant. And so we give out awards, and we have good drinks and great food and really just celebrate one another. Wonderful. Take us back to the origins of all of this. How did you get started in the pageant industry? Gosh? So when I was twenty three, I bought an arena football team in Georgia, and I was like, who's the prettiest girl I can get to do the coin toss? And since the football team was in Georgia, I thought, maybe I can hire miss Georgia. I don't know, maybe that's a thing, and so you know, she came and I hired her, and then we started dating. And then after the football team, I was looking for my next business to start, and I just really was drawn to pageantry one. I saw a very big opportunity because the industry was highly fragmented and at that time in two thousand and nine, contestants didn't know where to find a coach or hair and makeup stylist because there was no centralized location to even find new pageants. So I decided to build one online. The other thing is I saw the girl that I date and dated, she went through a metamorphosis in her confidence and in her look. Because what I discovered is that when you win a pageant, you're surrounded by this supportive team of people that say, oh, this color looks best on your skin tone. This is the best way that you should do your hair. You should consider doing your makeup like this. This is how you walk in heels, this is how you talk on a microphone. And it's really lifelong skill sets that would be advantageous to a woman and for me. And there's obviously pageants for men too, but for me, I had to go to personal development courses. Business courses hire consultants to learn the same thing that contestants get for free in essence, like when they win. Of course, So you know, many world leaders and media personalities got their start in pageants, but you still have certain groups that say pageants are vapid and shallow, and you know, so what would be your I guess the main thing you would say to combat that narrative. Yeah, I would just say that they're just ignorant of the benefits, Like you wouldn't say that Little League t ball is like irrelevant because the people don't go on to become professional baseball players, and they just see it as this antiquated thing that and they always say that men are in the audience kind of judging the women, and realistically, when you look at the audience there's primarily women and gay men if there's any of you, so, and the men that are there probably like boyfriends affording their girls and dads supporting their girls. But the thing that pageantry is about, if you look at pageantry from what it really is, it's a glorified job interview for a spokesmodel position. So how pageantry was originally created is it was a swimsuit competition. But that's because the swimwear line they were looking for a spokes model. So that's why the girls started competing first and swimwear right because they were looking for who would be the best swimsuit model. And then what's the next thing. The next thing is they needed to be able to talk on camera, you know, so then like, okay, let's do the on stage interview because we need to see how they respond in front of an audience, like if they're asked a question. And then it's like, well, let's see how they dress up. Because you're not gonna wear a swimsuit to a gala, but if you're a spokesmodel of a swimwear company, then you know you might be asked to go to a gala. So that's that's how it is. And if you look at pageantry through the lens of a job glorified job interview for a spokesmodel position, some of the phases of competition start to make more sense. So why girls are asked to do certain things like that because when they win, they will represent that pageant organization for the next twelve months and their job is to recruit new girls to come in to basically take their job. Of course, what would you say has been the most defining moment of your pageant planet journey? What's been the one standout moment that you said, you know, this is all worth it if you could name just one. Yeah, I mean the first thing that came to mind. It might not seem like this, but I what brought me into pageantry is actually the football team failed and so I had to start out delivering it from nothing. And I got the idea of this site, and but I didn't have any money. I had twenty dollars, So that's why I started the site with twenty dollars fifteen years well really yep, and the only thing I would really had was a desktop computer, and there was an Apple desktop computer, so I would literally because back in the day in two thousand and nine, internet was a little more expensive than it is now. Sure, so I took my whole monitor and keep adding all that, and I would give to a local Starbucks and I would plug it in. I'd be like typing, and I would type all the blogs, three blogs a day every day. So I'd sit down and type about twenty seven blogs or twenty one blogs for the week, and I preschedule them all. Sure, and an effort to try to build this thing from scratch. And I remember people laughing at me, and I remember being embarrassed, but I needed to do something. If not, I would be waiting tables the rest of my life, of course, And so it was painful. But the process of going through that and who I became in that process, that's the most defining, because just like any entrepreneur, you want your business to be bigger, and we are globally recognized company. But who I became in that process of going back and forth was. Critical, wonderful. I mean that what an inspiring story, you know, because I feel like we've all been through that, especially a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, many of us start from nothing. And yes, you have naysayers, you have people laugh at you and look at what you are now. So congratulations on that. Now a plug that I have to give personally for Pageant Planet. I come from America's next top model. I do a lot of mentorship of models, so I use pageant Planet to connect with other pageant directors who bring me on as a judge. So I'm a judge and I go on and I have made the best connections through pageant Planet. I cannot rave about this side enough. I've been using it since twenty twenty, I believe. So tell us a little bit, Stephen, for those that may not know what pageant Planet is, who should sign up for pageant Planet and what can you benefit from signing up? Yeah, so the best way if you're familiar at all with the wedding industry, Basically pageant Planet is to the pageant industry what the not is to the wedding industry. So if we serve three categories of people, so pageant directors and contestants and experts. So if you're a pageant director, naturally we have software that helps you score and manage all of your contestants. If you're a contestant, we have software that literally you just link your profile to whatever your pageant you have coming up, and then the system will tell you when you need to start training and like for what. So we'll say like, oh, your pageant's three months away, you need to start working on your evening gown walk and then here's how to do it. And then your pageant is now four days away. Now you need to book your hair appointment or nail appointment or whatever. So since push notifications all that, and if you're an expert, it helps you find clients. It's if you're a judge, it helps you find judging opportunities, MC's MC opportunities, things like that. So it really does just connect the industry together. Of course, it's so worth it. It's like a booking agent without all of the fees. You know, you just sign up and there you're connected to this whole world. We're here at this wonderful and I know you've got to go, You've got a red carpet to get off to. But it's the best in pageantry awards. When did you start this? How did it start? So it started actually eleven years ago, but it was all online and so I was like, gosh, nobody's really like honoring these directors, these contestants, these experts. So it's like, you know, we should come up with a scoring and a rating system to see, really who is the best of the best. And then last year was the first year that we actually did it in person, so I was like, oh, we've been doing it this tenth year anniversary, let's just celebrate them. And then this year was the year that we expanded it further and we started to bring in the top coaches in the industry and the top pageant directors in the industry to train directors how to do on a more profitable and efficient pageant. And so all these coaches over there train these contestants. I mean these coaches that came in. The cheapest one is about one hundred and fifty dollars an hour, and girls this year they only had to spend two and it was three hundred and fifty dollars to attend and they get all their meals, drinks, and about eight hours worth of coaching for all of that. And these are the top people in the industry. That is wonderful. So, Stephen, if we want to read for next year's best in pageantry, if we want to connect with the pageant Planet World. How do we do that? Just go to pageantplanet dot com, look at the menu and click best in Pageantry. Wonderful. We're going to be posting up all of those links how you can follow and get connected with the Pageant Planet team. Stephen, thank you so much for spending time with us. Thank you for coming here and interviewing me. I really appreciate it. And thank you as always for listening in. We will see you next time on backstage pass. This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network, where Real Talk lives. Visit us online at fcbpodcasts dot com.