Category Archives: Entrepreneurial Advice

Stop Making Excuses for not being Profitable!

I hear a lot of excuses from people as to why they aren’t profitable or why they can’t get a business up and running online.  It’s the same story different day.  For years people have been guilty of procrastination and excuses.  It’s part of our make-up, it’s in our DNA. 

It’s only when we decide we want more, decide we are fed up and decide we going to take control of our income and our lifestyle that we begin to make progress.   It’s after you hear that first “ka-ching” and make that first sale that you realize you have something to offer that the world wants.  So go give it to them!  There is nothing wrong for getting paid what you are worth.    What are you waiting for?

The first step is the hardest to take.  Just take the first step!

Crystal O’Connor is a single Mother of 3 kids and she can show you how to get started. 

www.moxiemompreneur.com

So You Want to Be Your Own Boss…

So You Want to Be Your Own Boss…

8 tips to get you going, even if you don’t know where to start

By Tamara Monosoff

From Entrepreneur.com

If you want to start a business but don’t know where to start, don’t worry–you are not alone. In fact, given the new economic reality of our time, more people than ever before have found the “job” they thought was waiting for them doesn’t exist. Others have come to the conclusion that they would rather create work they love, constructed to fit with their own life goals. No matter what the motivation is to be your own boss, you can start today.

Here are eight tips to get you started:

  1. Take a Stand for Yourself.
    If you are dissatisfied with your current circumstances, admit that no one can fix them except for you. It doesn’t do any good to blame the economy, your boss, your spouse or your family. Change can only occur when you make a conscious decision to make it happen.
  2. Identify the Right Business for You.
    Give yourself permission to explore. Be willing to look at different facets of yourself (your personality, social styles, age) and listen to your intuition. We tend to ignore intuition even though deep down we often know the truth. Ask yourself “What gives me energy even when I’m tired?”

    How do you know what business is “right” for you? There are three common approaches to entrepreneurship:

    Do What You Know: Have you been laid off or want a change? Look at work you have done for others in the past and think about how you could package those skills and offer them as your own services or products.

    Do What Others Do: Learn about other businesses that interest you. Once you have identified a business you like, emulate it.

    Solve a Common Problem: Is there a gap in the market? Is there a service or product you would like to bring to market? (Note: This is the highest-risk of the three approaches.) If you choose to do this, make sure that you become a student and gain knowledge first before you spend any money.

  1. Business Planning Improves Your Chances for Success.
    Most people don’t plan, but it will help you get to market faster. Abusiness plan will help you gain clarity, focus and confidence. A plan does not need to be more than one page. As you write down your goals, strategies and action steps, your business becomes real.

    Ask yourself the following questions:
    – What am I building?
    – Who will I serve?
    – What is the promise I am making to my customers/clients and to myself?
    – What are my objectives, strategies and action plans (steps) to achieve my goals?

  2. Know Your Target Audience Before You Spend a Penny.
    Before you spend money, find out if people will actually buy your products or services. This may be the most important thing you do. You can do this by validating your market. In other words, who, exactly, will buy your products or services other than your family or friends? (And don’t say… “Everyone in America will want my product.” Trust me–they won’t.) What is the size of your target market? Who are your customers? Is your product or service relevant to their everyday life? Why do they need it?

    There is industry research available that you can uncover for free. Read industry articles with data (Google the relevant industry associations) and read Census data to learn more. However, the most important way to get this information is to ask your target market/customers directly and then listen.

  3. Understand Your Personal Finances and Choose the Right Kind of Money You Need for Your Business.
    As an entrepreneur, your personal life and business life are interconnected. You are likely to be your first–and possibly only–investor. Therefore, having a detailed understanding of your personalfinances, and the ability to track them, is an essential first step before seeking outside funding for your business. This is why I recommend setting up your personal accounts in a money management system such as Mint.com to simplify this process.

    As you are creating your business plan, you will need to consider what type of business you are building–a lifestyle business (smaller amount of startup funds), a franchise (moderate investment depending on the franchise), or a high-tech business (will require significant capital investment). Depending on where you fall on the continuum, you will need a different amount of money to launch and grow your business, and it does matter what kind of money you accept.

  4. Build a Support Network.
    You’ve made the internal commitment to your business. Now you need to cultivate a network of supporters, advisors, partners, allies and vendors. If you believe in your business, others will, too.

    Network locally, nationally & via social networks. Join networks like NAPW.com, your local chamber of commerce, or other relevant business groups. Here are some networking basics:

    – When attending networking events, ask others what they do and think about how you can help them. The key is to listen more than tout yourself.
    – No matter what group you join, be generous, help others and make introductions without charging them.
    – By becoming a generous leader, you will be the first person that comes to mind when someone you’ve helped needs your service or hears of someone else who needs your service.

  5. Sell By Creating Value.
    Even though we purchase products and services every day, people don’t want to be “sold.” Focus on serving others. The more people you serve, the more money you will make. When considering your customers or clients, ask yourself:

    – What can I give them?
    – How can I make them successful in their own pursuits?
    – This approach can help lead you to new ways to hone your product or service and deliver more value, which your customers will appreciate.

  6. Get the Word Out.
    Be willing to say who you are and what you do with conviction and without apology. Embrace and use the most effective online tools (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn) available to broadcast your news. Use social networks as “pointer” sites; i.e., to point to anything you think will be of interest to your fans and followers.

    Even though social networks are essential today (you must use them!), don’t underestimate the power of other methods to get the word out: e.g., word-of-mouth marketing, website and internet marketing tools, public relations, blog posts, columns and articles, speeches, e-mail, newsletters, and the old-fashioned but still essential telephone.

    If you take these steps, you’ll be well on your way to becoming your own boss. It’s important to remember that you are not alone. If you want to “be your own boss” but you still feel stuck, reach out and connect with other entrepreneurs in a variety of ways. You may be surprised by the invaluable contacts that are right at your fingertips.


Tamara Monosoff is the author of Your Million Dollar Dream: Regain Control & Be Your Own Boss (hit #1 on Amazon in 3 categories: Marketing, Entrepreneurship & Home-Based Businesses). She is also the best-selling author of The Mom Inventors Handbook, Secrets of Millionaire Moms, co-author of The One Page Business Plan for Women in Business, and CEO of www.MomInvented.com. Connect on Twitter and Facebook.

How to Create an Overnight Success

How to Create an Overnight Success

Natalie Zaun just wanted to make a few extra bucks. What she got is a six-figure business that just keeps growing.

By Natalie Zaun

From Entrepreneur.com


While chasing kids around the kitchen in the fall of 2006, a friend and I decided we wanted to do more than pick up toys and change dirty diapers.

She sewed and, as a former junior high school English teacher, I was comfortable in front of others. So we thought we’d give the idea of selling custom purses at parties a try. After contacting a few friends to host parties, we quickly felt the excitement of giving women an opportunity to design their own purse. So with a little effort and research, PURSEnally Yours officially launched in January 2007, specializing in customer-designed purses.

Our intent was to make a little extra money, spend some time away from our lives as moms and perhaps even hire someone to work with us by the end of the year. It didn’t exactly happen that way. We hired another seamstress within two weeks, and we began to get quite busy just with the sales I was generating. In the first month, we had sewn 31 purses designed by our customers. By the end of the year, we had sewn thousands of them. Our sales topped six figures our first year in business.

During that first year, we hired six seamstresses and fabric cutters, and 13 direct-sales consultants. Because we need people who can sew well, we start them out sewing samples for us. Currently, we have a production team of 10 independent contractors and a waiting list just as long of women interested in working for us. I’ve been very cautious in hiring, consulting our attorney and our accountant to make sure these ladies fit the parameters of independent contractors.

A couple of blurbs in the local media, Fishers/Geist Magazine and at Geist.com, helped spread the word in the early days, but our customer base that first year grew largely by word of mouth through our customers and their handbags.

While the early success was certainly exciting, it was also overwhelming. About midway through the year, my partner needed to give up her portion of the company because of family conflicts. By the time we hit the last quarter of the year (aka, the busiest time), I was overseeing all aspects of the company, including production, which I knew nothing about. Fortunately, the seamstresses working directly with me were very excited about our success, and they were very helpful in navigating me into the next year.

After happily surviving the first year of owning a business–and succeeding–I was able to create a system that is still very effective and efficient today. The beauty about creating and owning your own business is that you can really design it however you wish. I have done just that.

PURSEnally Yours operates as a direct-sales company, which allows me to recruit ladies independently to sell purses through in-home parties or online. It also allows me to expand my reach. The company originally only had consultants in Indiana; now we have consultants throughout the country.

Initially, the biggest challenge in adding consultants was the cost of producing a sales kit. Each kit costs from $500 to $600–a lot to ask of women who wanted to join the team. So in the beginning, we didn’t charge consultants for the kits. Today the kits cost consultants $299 to $399, depending on whether we have specials at the time.

The design kit includes all of our current sizes and styles of purses and accessories, and consultants continue to receive new fabric swatches, fringes, etc., throughout the year. In addition, I work directly with each of them offering communication via e-mail or the phone to answer questions, provide support and give suggestions. We also offer incentives for consultants to get active quickly and earn cash back. Most of the women on our team are previous customers or have heard about the company through family and friends.

We also advertise for consultants via the web and encourage our sales team to spread the word. And we include a note in every customer’s purse mentioning our consulting opportunities. Turnover is high, so we’re always on the lookout for new consultants.

Members of our production team also work independently from their homes. They pick up orders from the office on a weekly basis, sew the purses and accessories at their discretion, and return them by the date requested. This has been a great opportunity for those ladies to turn their hobby into a full-time living.

PURSEnally Yours has been successful in growing without much risk. Because everyone works as an independent contractor, the “office” is still located in my basement. And because our products are custom designed, the company carries virtually no overhead. The office also doubles as my warehouse.

More than 80 varieties of fabrics are numbered and lined up on shelves. Each week, my production leader (head seamstress) sends me an e-mail with all the orders that have been collected, and I fill totes with fabric for our cutters to pick up and return by the weekend. They’ll cut the order per customer designs. Once they are returned, notions get added, and then they’re ready for the seamstresses to pick up.

The excitement of PURSEnally Yours continues to spread as more women are exposed to the fun, fashionable concept of designing their own purses. Currently, we are on track to have our best year yet. The recession did slow us down a bit, so I expect this year to be closer to what I was anticipating in the second or third year of business. We tend to do about 65 percent of our sales during the fourth quarter. But based on our gross sales and continued expansion of our consulting crew, we hope to reach $250,000 by the end of the year.

Think Outside the Bag
Here are some tips detailing what I’ve found helpful in developing my company:

  • Stay involved. I was so tired after the first full year of business that I passed along as much work as possible the next year. In doing so, however, I found myself frustrated because not everything was being done the way I thought it should be, such as communicating with salespeople and encouraging unique approaches to working with new consultants. I also noticed a decline in overall sales. Since it’s my company, nobody was going to care more than I did. I quickly became fully engaged again. I believe that in time I will have the opportunity to be comfortable and less involved, but it wasn’t meant to be in the second year of business.
  • Be proactive. I did not need to make a big financial investment when launching Pursenally Yours. This made it easy to get started, but challenging when trying to promote my business. I knew the concept was great, as the feedback from customers and consultants was phenomenal. So I did some research, created a press release and started contacting local and national print and broadcast media. I went to them instead of waiting for them to come to me. I get a response about 30 percent of the time, which often turns into free exposure for the company.
  • Change with the seasons. I see numerous designs from repeat customers throughout the year. This tells me that, as seasons change, so do purses. I make sure we continue to update our inventory by launching new fabrics every three months and a new product twice a year. Not only do ladies have the opportunity to design their own unique purses, but they can do it all year long. It’s just as exciting for us as it is for the customers to see the new selections available.
  • Give back. It’s easy once the company grows and you start earning money to want to keep as much as you can. It’s important, however, to make sure you take the time to give back. We have worked with numerous schools, churches and other nonprofit organizations to create FUNdraisers! It’s an opportunity to share the concept of the company with others, while they enjoy raising money for their favorite organization. Hosting a purse party to raise money can certainly be more creative and memorable than flipping through a catalog to place an order.

I was a junior high English teacher before I had children. I didn’t start PURSEnally Yours until both of my kids were born. I’m happy to report that I’ve been able to maintain my stay-at-home mom status while successfully growing and managing a nationwide business.


Natalie Zaun is the owner of PURSEnally Yours, specializing in custom purses, hip handbags and trendy totes. PURSEnally Yours operates in eight states and works with some 65 women who help sell, sew, cut and create the custom-designed products.

How to Improve Your Financial IQ

How to Improve Your Financial IQ

Stop avoiding your numbers–there’s nothing to be afraid of and everything to gain.

By Peri Pakroo

From Entrepreneur.com

Like many things we know are good for us–exercise, getting a good night’s sleep, laying off the French fries–keeping careful track of yourbusiness‘s finances is one of those must-do tasks to keep your business healthy. Nevertheless, a huge number of business owners neglect their numbers, and their businesses pay the price.

I tend to see two main types of financial blow-off:

  1. Fully neglecting to track income and expenses by letting receipts pile up (or get lost) and failing to enter data into a bookkeeping system.
  2. Doing a decent job of keeping income and expense records up to date, but failing to use the numbers to answer questions about the business’s financial situation.

While I’ve definitely known more than a few business owners guilty of the abject neglect described in item 1 (you know who you are), the second type of financial ignorance is practically an epidemic among owners of small to medium-size businesses. Over and over I hear owners admit sheepishly, “I don’t do enough with the numbers.” If you merely keep up with the basics, you might avoid true financial disaster. But you’ll definitely miss opportunities to thrive if you don’t use your data to make strategic decisions.

Getting Over the Hump
If you’ve had your head in the sand about your business’s finances, take heart: You are not alone (by a long shot). Tons–tons–of successful business owners loathe dealing with numbers. They regard financial management with fear, anxiety, insecurity or some combination of the above. Typically, they say they are simply too busy running the business to deal with tracking income and expenses or analyzing the numbers.

The good news is that affordable bookkeeping software automates most of the work, from tracking account balances to generating sophisticatedfinancial reports, putting essential financial information at your fingertips. If you really hate working with numbers or truly don’t have the time to do so, have a competent employee or outside bookkeeper do the job.

However, as the owner of the business and the person responsible for guiding it, you do need to be in the know about your business’s finances. So if you hire someone to do most of the financial management tasks, make sure you’re in the loop and that you understand what the numbers mean. Don’t be shy about asking for guidance or mentoring from an accountant or bookkeeper. If you feel insecure about your level of financial knowledge, you’re in good company. Just make a sustained effort to learn as you go.

Financial Management in a Nutshell
The trick with bookkeeping is to establish a system early to help you stay organized. By “system” I mean a simple process for organizing your receipts and files, as well as having bookkeeping software set up and configured. With a system in place, you’ll definitely be able to handle most or all of your bookkeeping tasks, even if you’ve never done them before. I typically break financial management down into three broad steps.

1. Keeping and organizing records of expenses and income: Financial management starts with keeping records of all the money the business spends (expenses) and all the money it earns (income). This means carefully keeping and organizing your receipts and expense records (such as bills from the office supply store, invoices from your web-hosting company, and receipts of payments to your employees and freelancers) and your income receipts (such as a cash register tape of your café’s income, check stubs from your client’s payment checks, or your invoices to clients marked “Paid”).

2. Entering this information into bookkeeping software: On some periodic basis–maybe monthly for a small consulting business and daily for a busy café or retail store–you’ll enter the information from your income and expense receipts into a bookkeeping system. More often than not, this will be some sort of financial management software such as QuickBooks or MYOB.

3. Generating financial reports: Finally, with up-to-date information entered into your bookkeeping system, you’ll generate reports such as a profit/loss report or cash-flow projection (described below) to reveal how your business is doing.

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Again, setting up a system will make a huge difference when it comes to entering and categorizing data in your bookkeeping software. With your data entered, you’ll be all set to do the important (and actually quite fun) part of financial management: generating reports showing you the financial health (or illness) of your business.

Often, business owners have such poor systems in place they barely manage to get their data entered accurately. It becomes a grueling task–hours spent searching for receipts and trying to decipher poorly documented expense reports–that they stop after the data entry stage and never get around to generating reports. Don’t let this happen to you. Generating reports is key to managing your business’s finances and making strategic decisions.

Financial reports summarize the data in your bookkeeping system to show you different aspects of your business’s financial situation. For example, a profit and loss report compares monthly income to monthly expenses to show whether your business is selling enough products or services to cover costs each month. A cash-flow projection shows similar information, but includes other sources of income such as capital contributions from owners or loans (that is, not just revenue from sales). It also organizes the information slightly differently to show you whether the timing of your income is adequate to pay your bills on time.

The Payoff
By generating reports, you’ll be able to see trends and patterns in your business’s finances and identify profitable opportunities to pursue. You’ll also avoid letting your business simply drift along–or worse, run it into the ground. Here are a just few ways that analyzing your financial reports will help your business:

  • You’ll be able to price goods and services more competitively, pace growth more effectively and trim costs strategically–for example, you might cut back on travel expenses or outsourced services that aren’t helping to generate sufficient income.
  • You may be able to reduce taxes by timing your purchases strategically and claiming all your deductible expenses–things that often escape businesses with disorganized records.
  • You’ll be able to manage your business’s cash flow, ensuring you can pay important bills on time. Cash-flow management is a critical element in every business. When it’s done poorly or not at all, you may find yourself short of cash when it’s time to pay taxes, payroll or other crucial expenses. This is exactly the type of scenario that forces businesses to close up shop for good.

Finally, if you’re itching to launch your venture and still worried that you have too much to learn in a short time, stop fretting. You don’t need to turn into a financial whiz overnight. In practice, I advise every small-business owner to consult at least once or twice during their startup days with an experienced bookkeeper or accountant (or possibly both) to help the business get started on the right foot. For those of you who feel like total novices when it comes to the money stuff, consulting a professional will help you get over the hump of your financial learning curve. There are also lots of useful organizations such as The Association of Women’s Business Centers and SCORE that can help get you up to speed.


Peri Pakroo is a business and communications consultant, specializing in legal and startup issues for businesses and nonprofits. She is the author of The Women’s Small Business Start-Up Kit.


It’s All in Your Head

It’s All in Your Head

When it comes to your business, are you tapping into power you already have?

By Allison Nazarian

From Entrepreneur.com

It’s been said that there is no stronger, faster or more powerful tool on earth than the human brain.

Yet when it comes to our businesses, too few of us fully tap into our brains’ vast and proven ability to make things happen. Perhaps we get tied up in daily details, focus more on what is practical and tangible or dismiss the idea that our thoughts can affect our reality as “new-age-y hocus pocus.”

Regardless of our opinions, the cold, hard subjective data of science tells us that the power of our brains can be harnessed to change, create and influence results and outcomes in all areas of our business lives.

So how can you begin to build your powerful business mind-set?

Begin with the end in mind. Working without a clear goal or defined end-point can result in lots of effort with no real results. Unless you know where you are headed and make your moves with purpose and intention, then you are likely directionless and inefficient. Take some time to determine whatyour business is all about. What are your financial goals? Goals for services or products? Sales goals? Marketing? Reputation? What’s important and what’s not? The more clear you are in these areas, the more likely it is that you will reach (and later exceed) your goals.

Opt for positive. Have you heard the term “self-fulfilling prophecy?” It is a statement you make or a thought you have that alters actions and events so that what you say or think eventually comes true. In other words, if you say or think you will sign (or lose) a big client or that you will bomb (or ace) your big presentation, guess what? Chances are you will be right. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.” Instead of skeptical or deflated, why not choose confident or hopeful?

Choose your posse. When it comes to committing to maintaining a positive mind-set, it’s important to not overlook your sphere of influence. Who are you getting advice from? Which people are supporting you? Do you have more cheerleaders than naysayers in your business life? Negativity and negative people can suck the energy from your worthwhile pursuits and derail you from your focus. Taking an honest look at hangers-on who might be sapping your positivity and dragging you down takes courage and can be painful. The alternative, however–allowing them to drag you down with them–will likely be far more painful.

Take off your blinders. Clarity regarding where you want to be is like fuel for your brain. Set your mind to it and be specific, and opportunities, breaks and offers will begin to come seemingly out of nowhere. That said, be open to the idea that you can get from Point A to Point B in many ways, including ways you may never have considered or realized. The more open you are to options and possibilities–however they come–the more those options and possibilities will actually come your way.

Expect it. True business success takes more than simply launching a website, printing business cards and opening a bank account. If your actions are not lined up with your thoughts, your external results will be as jumbled as the internal. Instead of taking what comes and being reactive to the circumstances of your business, why not grab the reins and see what you can do to create things as you would like them to be? While you are at it, take those efforts one step further; don’t just hope for what you want–find ways to make it happen. Believe in what you are doing, and when it comes to the results you want, have confidence that what you seek will find its way to you–and you to it.

The bottom line is that developing and honing your positive mind-set is not about make-believe and naive wishes. Nothing takes the place of good old-fashioned effort and work. But when your thoughts and actions are in alignment and you are clear and focused on what you seek and where you are headed, amazing things can–and do–happen.


Allison Nazarian is widely known as one of the most honest and innovative voices in marketing, blogging and the online world today. The author of Copywriting 101and One Minute Copywriter, Allison has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Small Business. Allison writes on theentrepreneurial life, working from home, working moms and real life uncensored.

How I Did It: Leslie Blodgett of Bare Escentuals

How I Did It: Leslie Blodgett of Bare Escentuals

A cosmetics queen and her loyal fans.

As told to Liz Welch

From Inc.com

When Leslie Blodgett became CEO of Bare Escentuals in 1994 — the company was then a tiny maker of bath and body products — she saw a huge opportunity selling healthy mineral-based makeup. But she didn’t quite realize how many women she could reach until she made a pitch on late-night TV. The company’s rapid growth led to a 2006 IPO, followed by the sale of the company this year for $1.7 billion to Shiseido, the Japanese beauty giant. Today, Bare Escentuals, based in San Francisco, has 130 boutiques in the U.S. and one in the U.K., and employs 2,200.

I’ve been working since I was 10. My parents got divorced when I was 9, and my mother raised me, my brother, and my sister on a teacher’s salary. She was tough. I probably would have been very lazy if she weren’t always on my ass.

My first real job was at McDonald’s. There was a girl there who taught me how to apply double shades of eye shadow, which I still do today. I always loved makeup, even though my mother didn’t approve. She was into the women’s-lib movement. She never remarried, loved her independence, and always told me to have my own career. Whenever I went out with a guy, I’d always pay for myself. I didn’t want men to think that they had anything on me.

I spent my first two years at Oswego State partying. My mom read about a new program in cosmetics marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, but I needed experience to even apply. My first interview was at the Christian Dior counter at Gimbels, on 86th Street, but I wasn’t their type. Bloomingdale’s wouldn’t hire me, either, so I waited outside the buying-office door every day until they gave me a commission job selling hair sticks. I made 21 percent of all sales and ate a lot of popcorn and ramen noodles.

By then, I’d been accepted to FIT. I took on part-time jobs, including one at the Ultima II counter at Macy’s. That’s where I learned about makeup application — and that the makeup counter is a terrible place. The saleswomen were angry and mean. Then I met Keith. He was the first guy who insisted on paying for dinner. We got married very quickly. I think I was looking for a guy who could take care of me emotionally.

I got a job at Max Factor in product development and discovered I had a really good eye for color. I moved quickly from assistant to manager. The company was sold to Revlon, which was then bought by Procter & Gamble. I was surrounded by younger M.B.A.’s who were making more than me and had attitudes. I resented that. As a result, I didn’t hire M.B.A.’s for years — I wanted passionate people coming up through the industry. I’ve since learned that you need balance.

Keith worked in film production, and we agreed that whoever was making more money would keep working when we started a family. Our son, Trent, was 3 months old when I took a job with Neutrogena. Keith has been a stay-at-home dad ever since. He does everything around the house. I don’t even know how to turn on the dishwasher.

In 1994, John Hansen, part of an investor group that owned Bare Escentuals, called me. I’d never heard of the company, which made the first mineral-based makeup line and had six stores in Northern California. Back then, everyone used liquid foundation, which seeped into your pores and gave you zits. A powder foundation that was good for your skin made great sense, but the shades Bare Escentuals had created weren’t working. They were gross. I knew complexions and how to match skin tones — and I saw a huge opportunity. John hired me, and I became CEO within a few months.

I relaunched the line as bareMinerals, with six eye shadows, six blushes, five foundations, and brushes. There were seven of us in the office just winging it.

By the fourth quarter of 1996, I thought we weren’t going to make it. I spent many sleepless nights worrying. There was not much on TV at 2 a.m., so I found myself watching a smiling woman on QVC selling jewelry and thinking, I could do that. I bought a white suit and a $29 fake 5-carat diamond ring and decided to give it my best shot.

I went on air August 30, 1997 — the day Princess Diana died. I said things like, “Do you want to make your skin break out even more? Then don’t try my product. But if you’re interested in something pure that you can actually sleep in, then let’s talk.” That day, we sold $45,000 worth of product. My heart was pounding when I walked off the set. I started screaming, “You rock!” to the host, Lisa Robertson, who’s now my best friend.

Women liked the product but had questions. I went online daily to respond but couldn’t keep up. And then I noticed other women were answering for me. That inspired me to start hosting events at our boutiques. I invited people to come share ideas and tips. I started naming new products after loyal fans.

I was scheduled every six weeks on QVC but realized I needed more time to talk about the application process. Infomercials seemed a great way to do that. Suddenly, we had the ability to get our message out daily if we wanted to.

The infomercials were a success, but people couldn’t find the product. So I focused on distribution. Sephora was an especially hard sell. I sent a white limo to Sephora’s headquarters, which is right down the street, and brought the buyers to our boutique. It worked. A few years later, Nordstrom called.

Big bashes get a lot of notice. So we had a cruise for customers to the Bahamas and then one to Mexico. It was like a giant slumber party: We dressed up and danced and had fun. Then, I took a bus tour of our boutiques and we hosted events. I’d talk about our products as well as my thighs. And my Spanx.

In the mid-2000s, we started growing too fast and couldn’t keep up with demand, so there were a lot of lost sales. We hired Myles McCormick as our chief financial officer in 2004: He’s an M.B.A., and so I’ve learned to love M.B.A.’s. He’s now the CEO, and I’ve become executive chairman. Myles has always done the hard math and business analysis. I make decisions from the gut.

I’ve received thousands of letters. One woman wrote: “Dearest Leslie, I’ve always been overweight. I’ve never felt pretty. I lived without cosmetics for 15 years. In 2008, my younger sister convinced me to try bareMinerals. I did — and then I cried. Finally, at 49 years old, I was pretty.” She’s one of my angels now, part of my volunteer ambassador program. We send these women samples, and they talk about the product to friends, strangers, and colleagues.

Why am I here? Because women want to feel pretty. If I have a bad day, I read these letters before I go to sleep at night. They remind me of what we do. It’s powerful. I don’t want to be a business. I want to be a community.

For a full archive of How I Did It features, visit www.inc.com/hidi.

5 YouTube Channels for Small Business Advice

5 YouTube Channels for Small Biz Advice

By Matt Silverman

From Mashable.com

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

YouTube is an often overlooked tool for business, not only as an engagement and marketing platform, but as an educational resource. There are YouTube channels dedicated to sound business advice, but distilling them from oceans of video junk can be a daunting task.

We’ve pulled out five subscription-worthy channels that produce regular, valuable content, and whose viewerships are already substantial. Adding these to your daily diet of social business resources is another great way to stay on top of trends and gather up new ideas for your business.


1. Harvard Business Publishing


At over 17,000 subscribers, Harvard Business School’s YouTube channel produces regular “ideacasts” with a focus on “practical insights, tools and resources.” The show offers interviews with prominent Harvard professors, authors, and business leaders who speak to issues in markets large and small.

 

2. Google Business


Make no mistake, the Google Business YouTube channel is a promotional tool for Google’sGoogle products. But there’s no sales pitch here — just really valuable insights on how to use many of the free and low-cost platforms offered by the search giant. Looking to optimize your AdWords campaign or glean a better view of the marketplace through search analysis? Stacks of short, well-produced instructional videos are at your fingertips with a subscription here.

3. U.S. Small Business Administration


Of all the places to find valuable resources online, you may not immediately think of the U.S. Government. But the Small Business Administration has done a good job stocking their YouTube channel with important information about government initiatives, government loans, legislative changes, and general small business advice about technology and marketing.

4. Robert Scoble’s Channel


Known as a Twitter influencer and blogger in the entrepreneurial tech scene, Robert “Scobleizer” Scoble’s YouTube channel is loaded with candid interviews with some of today’s hottest startup pros. The channel is less about hypothetical business advice, and all about what entrepreneurs are actually doing in the tech space. At the very least, it’s interesting stuff. At most, it offers concrete insights from some of the industry’s thought leaders that you can bring back to your own work.

5. Fast Forward


Google and The Wharton School of Business have partnered to develop a YouTube channel dedicated exclusively to InternetInternet marketing — a field that has been a boon for many small businesses looking to expand their reach on the social web. The channel offers up piles of short, easily digestible interviews with business leaders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs who discuss the goals and challenges of savvy web marketing.

Entrepreneurs Get An Edge Playing Videogames

Entrepreneurs get an edge playing videogames

From Forbes.com


In the early 2000s Silicon Valley-based business guru John Hagel III was involved in a high-tech startup and hired Stephen Gillett, a young man right out of college. Less than a half-dozen years later, Gillett was named a senior vice president and chief information officer for Starbucks–the youngest CIO of a Fortune 500 company at that time.

And Hagel thinks he knows a primary reason for his one-time employee’s meteoric rise. Everything that Gillett needed to know, Hagel said, he learned while becoming a guild leader in the popular online game World of Warcraft.

The co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte LLP, Hagel told the annual Wharton Leadership Conference that Gillett–just like other top players on the massive online multi-player game, with an estimated 8 million participants–reached out independently to build a large team of allies that solved complex problems and developed winning strategies.

Guild leaders in World of Warcraft “require a high degree of influence,” noted Hagel, a successful author and longtime consultant. “You have to be able to influence and persuade people–not order them to do things. Ordering people in most of these guilds doesn’t get you far.”

The look inside World of Warcraft and its relevance for today’s complicated business environment was part of a recent research project and book by Hagel and two co-authors–John Seely Brown and Lang Davison–that examines how companies re-invent and revive themselves by moving away from secretive, proprietary shops and toward a more open, collaborative business model. Their findings resulted in the recent publication of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.

The bottom line, they found, is that American companies will continue to fall behind their counterparts in emerging markets such as China or India unless they move toward what Hagel called “the edge,” which is where passionate, change-driven employees collaborate with others on the kind of innovations that prevent a company from seeing its core business model slowly erode. “The only thing that succeeds,” Hagel said, “is to take those initiatives on the edge and pull more and more of the core out to those edges–rather than trying to pull them back in.” He asserted that chief executives who stick to the conventional wisdom and cling to secretive proprietary business systems are doomed to fail.

Sustained Erosion
This year’s Wharton Leadership Conference — titled, “Leading in a Recovering (and Even Rebounding) Economy”–came at a time of increasing focus on corporate executives and the role they play in defining a business’s direction, its image and its accountability. The conference was organized by the school’s Center for Human Resources, Center for Leadership and Change Management and Wharton Executive Education, in partnership with Deloitte. Hagel heads Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, which studies emerging business strategies.

Hagel’s more than 30-year career in the business consulting and high-tech industries also included a stint at iconic 1980s video game firm Atari, as well as launching the e-commerce practice at McKinsey. He said the bad news uncovered by his research team was that the erosion of American business leadership was not so much a function of the downturn beginning in 2008 as it was a systemic decline dating as far back as the mid-20th Century.

In trying to quantify the problems facing American industry, Hagel and his co-authors found little existing data to measure the overall performance of U.S. companies. So they worked up some measurements of their own–and even they were surprised at what they uncovered. Since 1965, they learned, the return-on-assets for all American firms has eroded by 75%.

“The erosion has been sustained and significant. There is absolutely no evidence of it leveling off, and there is certainly no evidence of it turning around,” Hagel noted. Indeed, another measurement showed that survival is also an increasing problem for U.S. corporations. Firms in the Standard & Poor’s 500 in 1937 had an average life expectancy of 75 years; a more recent analysis of the S&P 500 showed that the number had dropped to just 15 years. “When I’m in executive boardrooms, I hear the metaphor of ‘the Red Queen’ and the notion that we have to run faster and faster just to stay in place,” Hagel said, referring to the character from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. “I would make the case, based on the analysis that we’ve done, that the Red Queen is actually an optimistic assessment of our situation, that we are running faster and faster and falling farther and farther behind.”

What went wrong? Hagel argued that American companies and their leaders were essentially not prepared for a move away from a corporate model of “knowledge stocks”–developing a proprietary product breakthrough and then defending that innovative advantage against rival companies for as long as possible–and toward a more open and collaborative business model that he called “knowledge flows.” The problem, he said, is that because of the increasingly global nature of business competition, the value of a major proprietary breakthrough or invention erodes in value much more quickly than in the mid-20th Century.

But in moving toward an economy based more upon knowledge flows, U.S. CEOs find themselves lagging behind their counterparts in rapidly emerging markets such as India or China, where businesses are much more adept at creating broad networks and finding innovation at “the edge” of their business rather than a proprietary core. “It’s basically invisible innovation to most Western executives,” Hagel asserted. “Most Western executives, when they go to China and India, are looking at products and technology and saying, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re not looking at this kind of institutional innovation so they don’t see it–and I think we need to see it in order to be successful.”

Indeed, in searching for examples as they researched The Power of Pull, Hagel and his co-authors looked far outside of traditional American corporations–at the highly competitive sport of large wave surfing, for example–to find places where teamwork, collaboration and skill in communication were bringing new heights of invention and success.

One conventional corporation that Hagel praised as an edge-based business is the German software giant SAPSAPnews – people ). He said the company’s longtime CEO, Hasso Plattner, came to a decision that the firm was too hierarchical and too adverse to change; his solution involved buying a rival run by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi. Plattner tasked Agassi with launching a venture called NetWeaver, an integrated technology platform. “Plattner said that [NetWeaver serves a function that is] not part of our core business, but it’s a highly speculative new initiative,” Hagel noted. “He said [to Agassi], ‘I want you to use that product to create a very different set of relationships with our customers and with our third-party-channel partners of various types.’ Shai Agassi used that mandate to go out and create this software user developer network which now has two million participants.” The network, Hagel said, is currently helping SAP to develop both new products as well as new kinds of business relationships.

In that sense, Hagel thinks the teamwork and communication skills that SAP software designers have been gaining are quite similar to the talents that leaders among the millions of online gamers playing World of Warcraft–people like Starbucks (SBUX – news – people ) CIO Gillett–have also been acquiring. In addition to the leadership qualities involved with becoming the head of a guild and assembling a problem-solving team from previously independent players, World of Warcraftenthusiasts, as noted by Hagel, conduct extensive after-action reviews of their performances as well as that of the leader. In addition, he said that game players typically customize their own dashboards to offer statistics and rate performance in areas they consider critical to their strategy.

Increasing the Perception of Opportunity
However, there’s one important quality to success for the 21st-century business leader that cannot be measured by a dashboard, and that is passion. Hagel said CEOs typically don’t understand the kind of passion that is necessary for a collaborative, edge-based emphasis. Ironically, Hagel said that American CEOs do place a premium on passion–but typically on the wrong type. “They say they want passion and I don’t think they’re being dishonest or disingenuous,” he noted. “They really want passion but what they mean by passion is somebody who will follow instructions passionately [and] work nights, work weekends, to get the job done.”

The type of passion that Hagel was describing involved what he called “a questing disposition”–that is, enthusiasm for pushing the work effort to new experiences and new frontiers, through activities such as attending conferences, meeting players from outside the company for lunch or getting involved in social media. Such workers are rare; Hagel asserted that no industry was composed of more than 20% of these passionate individuals, and the larger the company, the less likely you were to find them. Passionate employees are not always the happiest, he said, as many chafe at the corporate barriers to innovation. In fact, Hagel said he finds that most large American companies discourage passion among their workers. “Passion is extremely unpredictable in a world of ‘push,'” he pointed out, referring to the older proprietary business models. “Prediction is everything. Passion is a very dangerous emotion. Passion is something you pursue outside of the workforce–not in the workplace.”

Despite his somewhat pessimistic view of the U.S. business environment, Hagel said he believed that the potential is there for American business leaders and their companies to turn things around–providing that CEOs understand the pressures that they face are systemic, and not merely caused by the short-term economic downturn. Ultimately, success may mean defining a company in terms of its broader mission, rather than in terms of a specific product or products that it manufactures and it markets, he added. “I believe the opportunity for leadership in this regard is to flip the natural psychological reaction that we have to uncertainty,” Hagel said. “All of us, when confronted with uncertainty, tend to magnify risk and discount reward, and that tends to lead us not to act but to stay on the sidelines, hoping that somehow, somewhere things will clarify and then we can move. The role of the leader, in making sense, is to increase the perception of opportunity and to diminish the perception of risk.”

Donald Trump tells 22 Year old Millionaire how to Keep Going.

Trump discusses with a 22 year old millionaire how to make his next 40 million.  He tells him that the natural human trait is to lose focus and how important it is to NOT lost that vision and focus.  Overcome nature and continue to grow your business.

The Voice of the 21st Century Student is Speaking..are we Listening?

This guy is really amazing on so many levels and for so many reasons.  Dan Brown has put me in a state of Awe because of his Audacious Fearless Ambition.  He speaks the truth and speaks for our Youth. 

 Please listen up and open your minds and be aware that he is not the far and few in between.  He is the norm…he is our future and he is the voice of every student walking the halls of every school with glazed expression begging for us to empower him to

  • create
  • innovate

and become the next Entrepreneur with the next BIG IDEA!