One Entrepreneur's Journeyauthenticvisibility.com/pdfs/OneEntrepreneursJourney.pdf · Being an entrepreneur is a challenge. Enter at your own risk. The advice offered in this e-book

One Entrepreneur’s Journey26 Stories from Women on the Road

from Upstart Smart

upstart smarta division of brown bug, llcupstartsmart.com

©2009 brown bug, llcall rights reserved

2 | upstartsmart.com

http://www.upstartsmart.com/

acknowledgmentsA special thanks to all the entrepreneurs who contributed to this series. You are an inspiration. Thank you for having the nerve to jump and then sharing your experience with me.


forwardIt started as an idea for an article series for Upstart Smart Magazine. I simply wanted to interview a group of entrepreneurs about their successes (and failures) along the path to building successful businesses.

Within hours of getting the idea, I had ten interviews lined up, and I knew it was already turning into way more than a simple article series.

Interview after interview, I found inspiration and enthusiasm surrounding the journey of entrepreneurship. Not one person showed anything less than pure passion, and I was reminded time and time again why I’ve chosen this path - and why I love it.


http://www.upstartsmart.com/magazine/

disclaimerBeing an entrepreneur is a challenge. Enter at your own risk. The advice offered in this e-book is based on the opinions and experiences of the individual contributors and was provided in good faith. Always seek the advice of qualified professionals, especially when it relates to legal, tax, or financial issues surrounding your business.


contents 3 Acknowledgments 4 Forward 5 Disclaimer 6 Contents 7 The Big Why 8 The DiscoverHope Fund 10 The Entrepreneurs 11 The Stories108 A Thank You Note109 More Info on Upstart Smart110 The Design


the big whyfor The “One Entrepreneur’s Journey” Series

It goes without saying that I wanted to pick the brains of as many successful entrepreneurs as possible. That’s a given, but the story goes a little deeper than that.

I love surrounding myself with entrepreneurs. They’re a fiery bunch, and their enthusiasm and energy is contagious. Simply being in their company makes me want to be a better person, build a better business, and be of greater service. As I mentioned to some of the entrepreneurs in this series, after each interview, I wanted to jump off the phone and immediately call up ten people just to share the latest story.

On top of that, entrepreneurship is a path to self-reliance, and I especially love seeing women business owners accomplish that. Oddly enough, by the end of this series, I had only interviewed women entrepreneurs. It wasn’t set up that way. I actually asked one guy at the very beginning to be a part of the series, but circumstances kept us from being able to connect for it. After I got about half way through and realized I only had women contributors, I decided to keep the trend going. It turned out to be a fitting choice.

Within the first couple of interviews, I knew that I was being positively affected by the inspirational stories of the contributors. I realized through specific instances within this series just how small the world is. Like dominoes, one person inspired another, encouraging change in ways large and small. Without entrepreneurship, that change would never have existed. I decided that that gift should be passed on as far as it would go. In lieu of profits for this e-book, I decided to ask that donations be made to an organization that represented that message.

Call it coincidence. I call it fate. The chain of introductions throughout the series led me to Maggie Miller. Maggie started the DiscoverHope Fund, which provides micro loans to women in poverty so that they can pursue their dream of owning a business and ultimately create prosperity for their families, communities, and the generations that follow. A perfect fit and a perfect ending (or should I say beginning).


the discoverHOPE fundfor Opportunity and Change

I hope you’ll find this e-book to be a valuable resource, filled with important information and advice to help you along your path to building a successful business. If you do, please pass it on. Consider making a donation to the DiscoverHope Fund and be sure to share this e-book with other entrepreneurs and small business owners around you.

About the DiscoverHope Fund

DiscoverHope Fund (DHF) is an international development organization promoting abundance for women and their families living in economic poverty through micro

credit and sustainable support systems.

DHF Goal One: Providing Micro Loans for Macro Dreams

DHF gives small loans to women in poverty. Through micro loanincrements of $100 on average, DHF invests in the entrepreneurialcourage of women living in poverty so that they may grow theirsmall businesses, knowledge, and skills in order to create prosperity for their families, communities, and the generations that follow.This money continues to give year after year as women repay and reinvest. They do the work — DHF helps ignite their dreams.

DHF Goal Two: Maximizing Potential through Educational Training

DHF champions the development of every woman they work with through providing training support for entrepreneurial, financial,and personal goals. To flourish, women need to be given theopportunity to maximize their skills as entrepreneurs, women, and mothers who have the ultimate responsibility for their children in the developing world. DHF asks them what they want and need to thrive and then


https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=17048

connects them to resources and training that gives them opportunity to grow personal power and resources. They become powerful agents of true change — because they are ready and willing to lead their transformation.

You can learn more about the DiscoverHope Fund by visiting www.lendhope.org.

The DiscoverHope Fund was founded by Maggie Miller. Be sure to check out Maggie’s interview near the end of this e-book. I think you’ll be inspired by her journey.


http://www.lendhope.org/

the entrepreneursin order of appearance

11 Betsy Talbot of Married With Luggage 15 Stacey Kannenberg of Cedar Valley Publishing 18 Dawn Martinello of Monday Morning VA 23 Pema Teeter of Ink Street 27 Nancy Juetten of Main Street Media Savvy 31 Corey Colwell-Lipson of Celebrate Green 35 Pam Ivey of My Creative Assistant 39 Valerie Fitzgerald of The Valerie Fitzgerald Group 43 Josephine Geraci of My Mom Knows Best 47 Erin Lozano of Green Sherpa 51 Pearl Mattenson of PearlMattenson.com 55 Shannon Laackmann of Psychic Cowgirl 58 Jill Hart of Christian Work At Home Moms 62 Shama Kabani of The Marketing Zen Group 65 Anastasia Chomlack of AnastasiaPhotography.ca 70 Lynda Monk of Creative Wellness 73 Alison Rhodes of The Safety Mom 77 Pam Kapoor of PamKapoor.ca 80 Debbie Whitlock of Sound Financial Partners 83 Traci Bisson of The Mom Entrepreneur and Bisson Barcelona 86 Donna Santos of DonnaSantos.com 89 Jaime Almond of JaimeAlmond.com 92 Jen Spencer of Jen Spencer Coaches 95 Regina Perata of Restoring Power 99 Maggie Miller of the DiscoverHope Fund104 Amber Singleton Riviere of Upstart Smart


betsy talbotof Married With Luggage

When I contacted Betsy Talbot of Married with Luggage about being interviewed, she said that she wasn't sure she'd be considered a "success story," since over the past year, she's been more like someone who's running away from the "traditional" definition of an entrepreneur, but that there was probably a lesson in that somewhere. I agreed. I think you will, too.

We began by talking about how she defined herself now and how she's following her own path these days.

You can be a business owner in a lot of different ways. That's the important lesson I've learned. I do want to have my own business. I do want to control my own schedule. I want to contribute, and I want to help people, but I want to help people from a distance. I want to do it as a solo-person business, and I want to be able to produce information that's going to help. I don't necessarily want to consult one-on-one or in groups or through training classes. I want to be mobile in my own life, but still give a lot to other people. That was a big realization for me in my business, that even if I became wildly successful financially [through former plans], it just wasn't the right fit for me.

What's something that you wish you would have known starting out?

One thing I wish I would have invested more time and effort into is other opportunities to make revenue, like affiliate programs. You work so hard trying to get customers and build your own stuff, and it's almost like you feel like you're cheating if you use something else. You think, "Well, I'm not really into PR. Why would I have a publicity affiliate thing?"

The thing is, you can't be everything to your customers, but by bringing in those outside people, not only can you offer more and make yourself seem like a one-stop shop, but you're helping those other businesses and your own bottom line. It's truly a no-brainer, and I wish I would have spent more time and effort developing that than I did.


http://www.marriedwithluggage.com/

It's a two-sided thing that you don't realize until well down the road. Not only should you take advantage of other people's affiliate programs, but you should also create an affiliate program for your own business, too. Also, as early on as possible, create content around whatever it is that you're passionate about and whatever it is that you're doing and then set up those affiliate programs, both for yourself and using those that are already available to you.

It's amazing how long it takes for it to gel, but once it does, it's the tipping point. You don't have to do anything to keep the momentum going. That's one other thing that I would say to any other entrepreneur is start your content early and expect it to take a while, but once it does, you're sitting pretty. Don't go into business and say, "In two years, I'll start my blog."

"Because then I'll have something to talk about." You have something to talk about right now.

Exactly. That blog can also be turned into an informational product later on or into a classroom series. When you're doing that work, it's not for nothing, and I think a lot of people think that about a blog, "Well, I'm just giving my stuff away." No, you're not. You're creating something and drawing attention to your expertise. Another thing, everything you do should be able to be used in more than one way.

Right, it took me a long time to figure out that my newsletters should be housed online. You're writing this content. Why would you not maximize your efforts and use it so that search engines can pick it up? By sticking it in an email campaign manager, it's not searchable. It's going out to a bunch of emails, but search engines can't see it. You've just created content that no one else but your readers is going to see - ever, but if someone searches for a term that you wrote about in one of your newsletters (that you house online), they'll be able to find it and come across your site. That took a while for me to figure out. You're creating this content, but not maximizing it. It's the same with podcasts. You should transcribe each episode so that the content is searchable. Plus, some people want to listen, some people want to watch, and some people want to read. Why not cover all of them? You can use the same piece across all media. It's just amazing how long it takes for those lessons to stick.


The funny thing is, you have to learn the lesson yourself to get it.

Any other lessons you wish you would have learned earlier?

I wish I would have learned how to fail fast. It's a double-edge sword. You need to be able to stick with something long enough that it's going to work, but you also need to learn to cut your losses and move on when something's not. There's a fine line, but I do think that I stuck with things longer than I should have, accepting the status quo, when I should have said, "You know, this isn't quite right. I should move on to something else." On the other hand, there were things that I tried that I should have just given more time. They were working, but slowly, and I just needed to ramp it up, and I didn't.

Never be satisfied with your results. Always question that and say, "Is this something that is going to get better over time? If so, I should really stick with it and put the effort into it. Or, is this something that was just a pipe dream, and I'm glad I tried it, but it's just not working, so I should dump it and move on to something else?"

Do you think those things that you should have dropped because they were wrong for you, that there was a gut instinct or feeling about them, as opposed to those things that you should have just stuck with longer?

I do think that, and there's also this thing, "I've already invested x dollars, told this many people, or done this marketing campaign. If I pull out now, it's going to look stupid, or I'm going to be mad that I spent this money." We talk ourselves out of it due to a personal feeling, not a business feeling. That's where I made the mistake, in taking things too personal. Nobody's as interested in your business as you are.

Everybody tries something that doesn't work, and I think only the smart ones learn how to fail fast and move on.

How can we learn to fail faster?

Sometimes we get ideas in our heads, and we don't have someone else to enhance them or shoot them down. That's one of the drawbacks of being a solo entrepreneur. You get these ideas, and they don't ever get


properly fleshed out, if you don't have a sounding board. You can easily have a fantastic idea that, with the help of someone else, could be a monumental, great idea, but because you never seek that out, it never happens.

And seeking the right person's feedback.

Absolutely.

If I approach anyone in my immediate circle, family or friends, they're not going to be able to give the support I need for my business. I need someone who understands it and is interested in it, so you have to find fellow entrepreneurs for support.

You just have to know where you can go to get the help that you need and to provide help to other people. It's really important for people to reach out and become involved in a professional organization that is in alignment with what they're doing and that attracts the kind of people they want to emulate or learn from. Then it's easier to find someone to be, if not your accountability partner, then at least an informal board of directors, three or four people who you can call and say, "Listen, I've got this question. I want to run this by you." We all need that, especially when we're working alone, and too few people reach out to do that.

Any final advice for solo entrepreneurs?

Learn to fail fast. Seek out a board of directors to be your trusted advisers. Also, stick with something, especially your content. Your content should always be out there, promoting you as either becoming an expert or being the expert. You can't wait to develop your relationships online. Online it takes a lot longer. Start doing that now. Lastly, and most importantly, know what kind of lifestyle you want to live and find out if the business you started is in alignment with that, because you will continue to put roadblocks in your way to success, if it starts to interfere with the way you want to live your life. Make sure this life you're creating is the one you want.


stacey kannenbergof Cedar Valley Publishing

In this interview, I'm talking with Stacey Kannenberg of Cedar Valley Publishing. Stacey is the co-author of the award-winning books, Let's Get Ready for Kindergarten! and Let's Get Ready for First Grade!, as well as a visionary entrepreneur.

In addition to her ongoing work within the education system, she's also working to launch a "community makeover" program to help communities become self-sustaining and decrease local unemployment rates, as well as a "mom's media company" with other moms and mom entrepreneurs.

We hope to get the opportunity to catch back up with Stacey to hear more about her latest ventures really soon. Until then, here's our first conversation, and as you'll see, one person really does have the power to change the world.

So, I guess the first thing we can talk about is your business, what it is exactly that you do and how you got your start?

About five years ago, I started Cedar Valley Publishing. I fell into it, really. I was looking for a book to help my own kids get ready for school, couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, was really frustrated, because I kept hearing all of the reports that kids were coming to school not ready to learn, but when I went out to try to find that magic book, and all I really wanted was the Goodnight Moon of kindergarten that had everything in it that was curriculum-related that you read like a book and that you just read over and over, I couldn't find it.

So, one day I was walking with a friend, and I was mentioning, "Gosh, I wish I could find this book!" and in the same breath, I said, "Oprah is having this Big Dream show. I wish I had an idea." She went, "Hello?!" So, I decided to write the Let's Get Ready for Kindergarten book, and literally, it's because of Oprah. Oprah had a series of shows. After I decided this is


http://www.cedarvalleypublishing.com/

what I was going to do, she had a show on mom millionaires, and I was like, "Wow! If they could do it, so could I." Then she had a show on self-publishing that kind of told me how to do it.

How did you go from there, having this great idea, to actually taking action on it?

When I decided to have kids, I left corporate America, and I knew someday I was going to have a business. I just didn't know what it was, so I was looking for that magic business that I was going to run from home around my kids. The criteria was that I needed something I could do from home, something that would involve my family, and something that I could be passionate about.

The minute it popped out of her mouth, "Oh, you should write this book!", it clicked for me. I had already been to the book stores. I had already been online, scouring to find this magic book that just so happened to have the curriculum in it. We already had a book on the alphabet. We already had a book on numbers. We already had a book on shapes. I wanted it to be all-in-one, kind of like a text book. When I realized I couldn't find what I was looking for and how frustrated I was, I went to my play groups. I was a very big, active member of a play group in my area, and I belonged to a couple of others in different areas in our city, so I'm a huge networking type of person. So, I was just talking with my play group moms, and many of them had kids in the kindergarten system, and some of them were in first or second grade, and we started talking about it.

So, one of the first things I did was build that network. I found pre-school teachers. I found parents from within my pre-school. I talked to teachers all across the country. I talked to kids. I went to the source and said, "Look, we've got a problem, and the problem is, we're not communicating, and until you give parents the tool to help them get their own kids ready for school, you're not going to have kids coming to school ready to learn, because there's a disconnect."

So, the first thing I did was realize there was a need. I built that network, and building up that network was the smartest thing I ever did, because then when I was ready to launch, I had people who were already interested in what I was doing. I had a built-in network of people who wanted to buy and support the book.


How long do you think it took you from the time you decided, "Okay, this is what I want to do." and researching the idea of creating this book to the point when you said, "Okay, I've got my network built. I've got the support I need. I've researched this. It's time to get started putting this together."?

In 2002, Oprah was advertising for her contest, and I knew right there that I wanted to do it. In 2003, we were writing. Then in 2004, we launched the book. I built that network. It's amazing. Just picking up the phone, with a phone and a computer, I literally launched this company. I had a little check mark, "Who do we know from Ohio? Who do we know from Missouri?" And, what I tell people is, it's almost the people you don't know very well that seem to get so excited and are the ones to help you the most. It's someone standing in line at the gas station that gets so excited about what you're doing, and you exchange numbers, and she connects you with fifteen teachers.

Within your friend network, you might not find that same support, because they're like, "You want to what?! You're not a teacher. What do you mean you're going to sell this book to schools? They're not going to buy it." You have to go to people who get excited, people who have that same positive energy that you do.

One thing I've learned along the way is that obstacles will be put in your way, and it's not going to be easy, but the more hurdles you're willing to take, the more it does become easy, and now I'm at that point where things just seem to fall in my lap, and it's from all the hard work that I've been doing for the last five years.

What's the most important lesson you've learned as a solo entrepreneur?

I'll give you a quote that my husband put on a clock that he bought for me in 2004 when we launched Cedar Valley Publishing. He made up this phrase, which has now become my mantra: The dream is clear. To believe is the reward. My take-away is that I believe I can change the world, and I believe that I will.


dawn martinelloof Monday Morning VA

In this interview, I caught up with Dawn Martinello of Monday Morning VA. Even in the nine months that her company has been open for business, Dawn has already had amazing success, working with the likes of Danielle LaPorte of WhiteHotTruth and nearly booking herself solid.

She's managed to build her business almost exclusively through the use of Twitter and referrals, and now she's sharing her tips and advice for using social media, staying on track, and building strategic alliances to succeed in business.

Tell us about your business and how you got your start.

I actually opened the company in February of this year, after wandering around the job field, not too sure what I wanted to do after I had my son. I had taken a couple of at-home jobs where I worked as a virtual assistant for different companies, and I really liked the work and the availability it gave me for my family.

Also, here in Canada, we have a couple of different programs that allow us to open new businesses and have a network and the ability to pull from those things to get information and financial assistance, so it was a really good time for me to really think about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to take my life and business.

I sat with my husband a couple of nights, and we talked about some of the things that I was really good at and that I was really passionate about, and some of the things I really enjoyed doing was organizing and form-filling and all those kinds of things that didn't really make a lot of sense one-on-one, so I started to pull them together and realize the kinds of services I could offer.

Basically, Monday Morning VA is a virtual assistance firm. We collaborate with small and home-based businesses and focus on people who are looking to put their time into the growth and success of their businesses.


http://www.whitehottruth.com/

http://www.mondaymorningva.com/

One of the biggest things people have problems with when they start their businesses is that they have so many hats to wear that they don't know where to start and don't have enough time in the day to do all of the behind-the-scenes kinds of things. That's where we come in.

I always tell our clients that our services involve anything that needs to be done within your business that doesn't end with you getting an invoice from your client to be paid. That gives them a lot of time to put back into their businesses and working on what they're best at.

How has your company developed so far?

When I first started the business, it was just me, so I was limited to what services I could actually provide myself - administrative type things, social media, things of that nature.

As our company started to grow, people were asking for very specific types of services, like web design and bookkeeping. That's when I realized there was only so far I could go on my own, so we started pulling in experts from other fields. We brought in bookkeepers and accountants. We've got a couple of web designers who can do Wordpress and Joomla design. We have a couple of general VAs as well, because the last thing we want to do is overbook ourselves. We want to make sure we have enough availability for our clients' schedules as well.

Our services now are very wide in range, and we're always expanding on them. Clients are always coming up with new things that they want to do in their businesses and coming to us to see if it's something we can do. Often, if it's something we don't know how to do, we take the time to learn how to do it for them, so we can start to provide that service.

You're probably seeing this, especially at this time in your business, is that you end up maybe a little bit different and maybe considerably different than what you started out doing.

Absolutely. In the nine months that we've been in business, we've already started to change our business plan. It's very fluid, and you do have to go with the ebb and flow. I had no intention, at least in the first year, of bringing anybody into my business. I needed to do it on my own to figure out the best ways of doing things and where I wanted to go so that I


could narrow down the services to offer.

The problem with that is that clients were starting to ask for things that I couldn't provide, and I had to think about what I wanted to do. Did I want to turn away these clients or refer them to somebody else and lose income to my business, or did I want to start changing what my business was going to be?

Changing from your original thought is sometimes very difficult to do, but it's very necessary to be able to see where things are going and talk to your clients to find out what they need, not what you want to provide for them.

It's kind of a line you have to walk between accommodating and having the sticktoitiveness to be consistent while you gain traction.

Absolutely. One of the things I want to avoid in my business is becoming a staffing agency, where I literally have hundreds of people working for me. I don't think that's the direction I want to go with my business, so there will be a time when I reach a cutoff point where there's no longer room in my business to bring other people in or move into those things.

One of the ways I anticipate being able to cut that off before it happens is to start building strategic alliances with other companies, so instead of bringing in people to work with me, being able to move clients between the two businesses depending on the types of services we're each offering.

But, you're right. There is a very fine line between giving in to everything your clients want and staying true to your business and who your clients really are.

What checks and balances do you think help with that?

Right now, the biggest thing that we're using is the marketing plan that we developed in the very early stages, because it does talk a lot to who are target market is. Our target market is really going to define what our business is.

Do you see certain areas within your business where you seem to be


having early success?

Our early success has always been involving the social media. The big three of social media, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, are the ones that people are always asking us for, but also putting together marketing plans that involve social media and teaching them how to use it effectively.

Often, when people are coming to us, they've got their Twitter accounts all set up, and they're not understanding why they're not having the amount of followers or feedback they were hoping to get, and it's all about teaching people how to do it properly for themselves. Of course, we'd love to handle all of the services for them, but social media is all about relationships, so it has to be their voice handling those things.

Let's talk about that a minute, how you're using Twitter to grow your own business.

Twitter has been probably about 90% of our business. We haven't spent any advertising money. Everything has either been Twitter or referrals.

We do a couple of things. I start with just putting the information out there that I think is going to be beneficial to my target audience, so when I'm talking about solo businesses, I'm giving them information on how to create systems, inspirational quotes that will motivate them, tips and ideas on how to do their newsletters, and things like that.

I also have keyword searches that I do in Twitter, and I monitor those. There are actually people who are literally going on there and saying, "I need a VA. Who's out there?" Then there are some people who are just struggling with their businesses and talking about it on Twitter, and I make a connection that way, offering them a copy of our workbook.

Between those two things, we've built our business to the point where we're almost full.

Do you see certain areas within your business where you're struggling a bit?

Busting into certain niche areas is probably where we're having the most difficult time.


http://linkedin.com/

http://facebook.com/

http://twitter.com/

Is there anything you wish you would have known before you started your company?

The biggest thing I had a problem with in the beginning was that I really thought I had a great bookkeeping/record-keeping system in place, and I also figured I could just do it myself. Now, I'm finding that I have these piles of paper, and I've recently hired a bookkeeper.

Set up your systems for everything you do will do in your business before you open your doors. That's not something we had set up when we started, but it's something that I wish we did.

What's the most important lesson that you think you've learned so far?

There's actually a couple. The first one is knowing exactly who my clients are. I started with too big of a segment of clients, and I'm really starting to learn who my ideal client is.

The other one is just knowing when to ask for help. As a woman especially, I think it's very hard to reach out to other people.


pema teeterof Ink Street

In this interview, I caught up with Pema Teeter of Ink Street. Pema is a writer and playwright who helps others get in touch with their passion and then articulate that so that they are more successful in life, truly inspiring work that helps her clients be the best versions of themselves.

On top of her freelance writing, Pema is currently co-writing and directing the one-man show, SexyNurd.

Tell me a bit about your work and what it is that you do.

Ink Street started out as a sample page of my work and has turned into my freelance writing business. As a copywriter and ghostwriter, I get into people's work and the way they think about the work that they do and then find the best way to reach their audience. That conversation always turns into a story. That story is what ends up selling themselves or their product, so I've become sort of like a story coach or story charmer, kind of like a snake charmer.

When did you realize you were becoming an entrepreneur and that this was turning into a business?

I never thought that being a writer would turn into being an entrepreneur. I had a day job as an admin assistant, and on the side, I started to do some freelance business newsletters for people that I knew, and I loved it. Over the course of the years that followed, I kept my day job, but my client load increased very slightly, and I realized that if I wanted to quit my day job, I could be a writer by ghostwriting. I made the leap. I left my day job and gathered my clients and started to meet with a strategy coach who helped me set up my business and anchor into what is necessary to run that business.


http://sexynurd.com/

http://inkstreet.com/

What have been the biggest obstacles for you so far?

The biggest obstacle to doing it was money. I needed a day job in order to live and survive, so money was the first obstacle. Then in the past year that Ink Street has been in business, the biggest obstacle is my own consciousness. I would say that Ink Street has had no other obstacle but myself. Every time I assert myself out into the marketplace, I draw business. Before I ever started doing that, I didn't have any idea where the business was going to come from, and I was really worried and was like, "I only have so much in savings. How long am I going to last? How am I going to get new clients?" At that time, I was the obstacle in terms of being afraid.

Then I was the obstacle in thinking, "I don't have the savvy to set up this business. I don't have the entrepreneurial savvy to be fast and furious and wheeling and dealing." Then I realized, "Well, I'm kind of a slow mover. I've been moving slowly into the work that I do my whole life, and that works for me." I find that I'm really successful and that my clients come back to me and refer me to other people when I take my time and build a relationship. This business will build itself, and I don't have to drive myself crazy thinking that I'm not doing it right or that I'm not doing it fast enough.

Right, there's no one way to success, and you will fail at times.

There was a point in time when I was so broke that my friends were buying me groceries. I was sad and depressed and couldn't get a job. It was ugly. I remember thinking, "All right, I've gotta start remembering things that I'm passionate about." The more I started to recognize that and live in the recognition of what I was passionate about, the more the clouds cleared away. I got a fantastic job. I got my freelance clients. My life was great, and it took me remembering what I was passionate about in the middle of all of my failure to get me out of the failure.

What are you doing now to live from that place of passion, but also approach this as a business?

I meet once a week with my friend Regina Perata, a business consultant, and I also meet with Jillian Taylor, a business strategist. It's uncovered my core competencies and the things I really love to do, and it's removed some frustrations so that I can focus on what I do best, and then I can


http://illuminarygroup.com/

http://www.reginaperata.com/

make my business out of what I do best, so the most important thing is to talk with other entrepreneurs and with a business strategist.

The next important thing is a daily practice. In my life, I wasn't always the best at keeping a calendar. I just kind of moved with the flow, but I'm starting to plug into a daily calendar that includes whatever daily writing I'm going to be doing for my clients, whatever reaching out I'm going to be doing in the community, whether it's volunteering or going to a networking event. It's been really helpful to me to stay true to my calendar.

How about getting new business? What are you doing there?

I haven't really been active at getting new business. I've been active at creating new relationships, and that occurs just from going out and meeting people, whether I go see shows or get invited to a networking circle or go to a luncheon for business. I'm so attracted to people and entrepreneurs, and that usually gets me finding out about someone's business and what it is they want to express in their work, and then I have a business connection. For me, when I realized that my lead generator was just being authentic and curious at an event, it took a lot of pressure off.

What's the biggest lesson you've learned so far?

I thought that I had to do everything, even the stuff I don't like to do, but I found out through talking with my strategy people that I could focus on the things I do well and the things I love and then make my business out of that, not just make my business a catch-all writing clearinghouse. When I learned that I could discern what I love and make that a business, that made all kinds of possibilities open up for me.

So, your sounding board is one of your biggest assets?

The business I would be doing without Jillian and Regina is completely different than the business I do with their input. I can't believe it never occurred to me before that a mentor or sounding board or collaborator in idea generation would be so crucial to my success in the world.

What do you wish you would have known earlier on?


I wish I would have believed earlier on that a business is a growing process, and it doesn't have to be perfect when you first get started. It seems like the thing you learn when you're six-years-old and practicing piano. You're not going to know it immediately. You have to practice, practice, practice, but for some reason, I had it in my head that if you're going to do it, you've got to do it well. Well, if you don't know how to do it, then you can't do it well, so how do you start a business, when you don't know how to do it? Failing is a part of succeeding. Doing is enough to get you started.

I've also learned that once you've hung your shingle, people will come. Of course, you want to give a quality offering. You want to do good work, but I thought I needed to know how to run a business in order to give my offering. I didn't realize that I could learn how to run a business while I was giving my services. I didn't realize I could learn along the way.


nancy juettenof Main Street Media Savvy

In this interview, I talked with Nancy Juetten of Main Street Media Savvy. Nancy helps business owners everywhere quickly get up-to-speed on do-it-yourself publicity to share their messages in the media.

She's a publicist, “Media Savvy” newspaper columnist, DIY publicity blogger, speaker, and creator of the popular Media-Savvy-to-Go Publicity Toolkit and Bye-

Bye Boring Bio Action Guide. She's also a Publici-Tea™ workshop trainer who inspires business owners to take control of their media opportunities through consistent, winning actions every day.

What do you think you're getting right so far as a solo entrepreneur?

One of the things I've done really well is craft a very compelling brand message that really resonates emotionally with the customers I want to serve. My brand message is "Get seen, heard, and celebrated in your own backyard and beyond," and my brand is Main Street Media Savvy. Getting to a real, emotionally-charged, and unique selling proposition, or brand strategy, has been a huge "aha" for me, and it's been a very magnetic tool to invite more of the right people to do business with me.

Did anyone help you develop this brand message?

Sure, it's pretty compelling the way this came to me. I get thank you notes from people all the time. I have my whole office wallpapered with thank you notes from people all over the world that have said, "Thank you, Nancy. Because of what you showed me or what you did for me, I am now known in my own backyard." It was right under my nose all along that people were paying my fees and doing whatever it is that I'm doing, but they were going a step beyond and actually taking a piece of personal stationery with a pen and saying, "Thank you" and using words that were far more complimentary than I ever could have thought, and I thought, "This is really personal for people." That was sort of my "aha" moment, that I'm not getting people free publicity. They don't care about free publicity. They want to be seen, heard, and celebrated.


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http://www.mainstreetmediasavvy.com/

http://www.mainstreetmediasavvy.com/

For anyone who is struggling, what is it that you really do for people? How does it matter to them? There's probably a pearl of a brand idea residing right there.

How did you fine tune your vision?

Suzanne Falter-Barns runs a site called GetKnownNow.com, and she helps people craft their brand strategies. I signed up for her extraordinary business-builders course, and it wasn't for the faint of heart. She really has you go through all these exercises to get clear about who your ideal customer is, and then you have to figure out what you do for them and why it matters. As a result of going through that course and doing the heavy lifting, I came out with this brand strategy. I can't say enough for her Get Known Now program. I think it's really helpful to work with someone who has a vision bigger than yours to make you see what's possible.

Once you had your strategy in place, how did you start to get your brand out there?

Funny story, I have always been very interested in comfort and joy products, and I was having a pedicure with one of my good friends, Michele Lisenbury Christensen of WorkingWithPower.com, and she said to me, "As good as you are at explaining publicity to people and helping them do what needs to be done, and as much as you enjoy drinking tea and eating chocolate, why don't you create an event that brings all those things together? You can call it Publici-Tea and bring people together over tea, chocolate, and conversation." It was like someone hit me over the head with a crowbar!

So, shortly after Main Street Media Savvy brand launched with the tag line "Get seen, heard, and celebrated in your own backyard and beyond," I launched my very first Publici-Tea half-day workshop. I did it as simply as sending an email out to my newsletter list that said, "I thought it would be fun to bring some of my publicity-seeking friends and fans together to learn how to use publicity to serve their business." Ten minutes after it went out, I had twenty-two people sign up, and I thought, "Oh my goodness, this is really striking a nerve. I'm just going to build on it," and that's what I've done. Just about every month since then, I've had a sold out Publici-


http://www.workingwithpower.com/

http://www.getknownnow.com/

Tea workshop.

It's really been fun just to sort of go with my own authenticity, things that I love and things I'm committed to, and make it available in the ways that are convenient and delicious for the people who want that information.

What has been your most important lesson so far as a solo entrepreneur?

The most important lesson I've learned is that the why I do what I do has to be bigger than the how or the what. The why is the biggest thing. I have to be mission-driven. I have to have a bigger idea that's beyond products and services and that I can be proud to share with others and that can help them in a bigger way.

When you're starting a business, you just want to make enough money to buy the better groceries and pay the bills, then you want to have better clients and dance with better partners, and then somewhere along the line, you have your "aha" moment and realize that what you're doing is bigger than products and services and it's a mission well worth fighting for, and then all of a sudden, you have advocates who are willing to do what they need to do for you. All of a sudden, you have something you're really proud of. You can build a tribe around whatever your mission is, and people will be happy to advocate for you, and you can grow a lot faster than you could ever grow by yourself.

The other thing that I've learned is to assemble an extraordinary team. Building a quality team of quality partners is really important.

What do you wish you would have known earlier on or before starting a business?

When you work for an employer, you go to the job, you do the job, you go home, you probably think about it a fair amount if you're a top performer, but you're able to have a better separation between work and home. When you run a business from your home, the separation between work and home is really difficult to achieve, and the differentiation between life and work is very unclear. The one thing I've learned is how really all-consuming running a business can be, and that's challenging.

It's always easier to work for someone else. When you work for yourself,


the buck always starts and stops with you. The pressure is always on, and there's no easy button. You really have to want it bad, or it's easy to go back to work for someone else.

There's also a fair amount of isolation running a business like this, because you're in your office making it happen. It's not like there are folks at the water cooler you can go and chat with and brainstorm with. It takes an incredible amount of discipline and focus to make things happen everyday on your own. You need a community of friends and colleagues and people you can connect with to just bounce ideas. The isolation that a solopreneur can feel can be a little bit suffocating at times, so it's important to join a professional or mastermind group.

What's your best advice for new solo entrepreneurs?

Read Michael Gerber's The e-Myth Revisited and be really clear about what your commitment is. Running a business because you're good at something is not necessarily a sustainable way to be successful. You've gotta be in it for the long haul. You've gotta be willing to make sacrifices and work really hard and make mistakes.


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corey colwell-lipsonof Celebrate Green

In this interview, I spoke with Corey Colwell-Lipson of Green Halloween and Celebrate Green, both part of a company (The Green Year, LLC) that she started with her mom and business partner, Lynn Colwell. Last year, they wrote their first book, Celebrate

Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family, and they're on their way to becoming a nationally recognized success!

Tell me a little about your business and how you got your start.

We've got two main things going on. The first one is Green Halloween. It's not actually a business, but it is what started everything, so it's an important part of the story. In 2006, I went trick-or-treating with my girls and another group of moms and kids. We were amazed to see that the kids were interested and excited in the things that weren't conventional candy that were being handed out. I think that year they were bubbles and stickers.

After Halloween night, the moms were sitting around talking, "Why is it that the kids got so excited about these things?" We realized that kids today are over-exposed to candy. It's not that they like it any less. It's just that it's everywhere. When we were kids, they wasn't the case. Now, teachers keep candy on their desks, doctors offices hand out lollipops, and it's at birthday parties. It suddenly struck me that we might have an opportunity to make the holiday a little bit healthier, and if we could do so, then perhaps we could make it a little more earth-friendly as well.

I didn't know what people would make of this idea, but the next Halloween, I launched a community initiative called "Green Halloween," and really sort of over night received the support of businesses all over the Seattle region. Whole Foods Market, a hospital, a parenting magazine, people kind of came out of the woodwork, loved this idea, were excited by it, and said, "How can we help?"


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http://www.thegreenyear.com/


http://www.celebrategreen.net/

http://www.celebrategreen.net/

http://greenhalloween.org/

Moms, through blogs, found out what we were doing here in Seattle and began spreading the word. We had a lot of people contact us and say, "When is Green Halloween going to come to our cities?" We weren't sure how we would make that happen or what we would do, but the following year, in 2008, we officially took Green Halloween nationwide, again with the sponsorship of businesses and organizations and with the help of volunteers.

We're heading into year three, and we're continuing to expand and grow. We've partnered with Dr. Oz and his organization in New York City and another organization called Action Arts League in California. We've partnered with EcoMom Alliance. We've got things happening all over the country.

Green Halloween itself remains a grassroots initiative, but it is tucked under the umbrella of a business that my mom and I started together, which is called The Green Year, LLC. That business is basically expanding on the ideas of Green Halloween and taking it out to other holidays and special occasions year round. We have a book that came out last October, and we speak and write and do all kinds of things.

What has been the biggest way that you've gotten the word out about your organization?

I believe it has been blogs, other people getting excited about what we're doing who've helped to spread the word. We've been featured in dozens of blogs, in newspapers, magazines, radio interviews, and we've done some television. It's really peoples' enthusiasm that has helped carry our idea.

What have been some of the challenges and rewards of working with a family member?

My mom and I had never really worked together, and we weren't sure that we were going to be the best fit, but because things happened so quickly, we didn't really have time to stop and think and analyze, "Okay, what's your role going to be? What's my role going to be?" We both have very strong personalities, but at the same time, we bring different things to the table, so her talents and expertise and passions are a nice complimentary fit to mine.



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http://www.actionartsleague.org/

http://www.healthcorps.org/

http://www.doctoroz.com/

When we wrote the book, we had a publisher who asked us to write the book in six weeks, and that's a very short period of time. We didn't even have an official outline at that point. It just sort of flowed out of us. We had no plan, and we really didn't discuss how we were going to do this. We didn't have time. One of us would just start writing one chapter. The other would write another. We would send it over to the other person by email and look at some edits and sort of flip flop back and forth like that, and finally, we had a book.

We took that sort of method in working when we started expanding out to other things, where one of us just says, "I'll take this project," and the other one says, "Great, how can I support you?"

It's been truly an amazing process. I've had so much fun working with my mom, and believe it or not, we haven't had all that many challenges. For the most part, we work together seamlessly.

Do you each have clear roles now within the company?

Yes, we take on different parts of the business. My mom pretty much oversees all the PR, communications, and marketing. She reaches out to all of the media. I oversee all of the partner relationships. For whatever reason, I was born with no fear of cold calling some CEO and letting them know what we're doing and asking if they want to partner, and that's actually been a very successful way that we've found a lot of our corporate partners and sponsors. For anyone seeking corporate sponsors, literally, just call them up and ask to speak to their top person instead of emailing or starting with an intern. So, I have handled and overseen all of that, as well as all of our coordinators and directors in cities all over the country. As far as our writing, articles and that sort of thing, we kind of just say, "Who wants to take this one? Who wants to take that one?"

Your business kind of came to be without much planning, but do you have future plans and goals for the company?

We do have set goals. We do have ideas about where we want to go, but you know how people talk about vision boards? I'm actually slightly opposed to a vision board, only because I feel that if you're so focused on what you think your plan or dream or goal is, you might miss out on other


opportunities that could take you to fabulous places. I think that often times in business, it's the product, the goal, the outcome that is paid so much attention, but what about creating a process board that says, "I want to be surrounded by people that inspire me"? Then who knows what the outcome will be, but it's the process, the journey that's going to be the biggest part of your story. Time and time again, we see people who get whatever it is they thought they wanted, and they're still itching for something else, because I think it's about the process. I'm not really sure it's about what the eventual goal is in the end.

I do want to throw in there that my mom and I have a luxury that maybe other entrepreneurs don't have, and that is that this is not a need, it's a want. That does allow us flexibility and to be open and take risks that maybe other people can't. We recognize that we do get to make some of the decisions the way that we do because we're in a fortunate position.

What would be your best advice to new solo entrepreneurs?

I think the most important thing is to do what you are passionate about. Make sure that at the root of your business is something that excites you and that you are jumping out of bed in the morning to do it. The hard times, the challenging times are going to be there, but because you really are excited about whatever this is, you're able to quickly skip through those moments.

There is one other thing I would like to add. There is no way that we would be where we are were it not for the generosity and enthusiasm of other entrepreneurs and people in our support network. Stacey Kannenberg alone is the perfect example. She is there at every turn to support her fellow entrepreneurs. I think that both being open to the support and help of others and being open to helping others, even when your own plate is very full, is key.


http://www.cedarvalleypublishing.com/

pam iveyof My Creative Assistant

In this interview, I spoke with Pam Ivey, a key leader in the virtual assistant industry. Her primary directive is to increase awareness of the industry among business leaders and influencers in North America and around the world.

She has trained and mentored hundreds of VAs and is the owner of the Canadian Virtual Assistant Network (CVAN), co-founder of the REVA(Real Estate Virtual Assistant) Institute and CASPAA (Coaches, Authors, Speakers Professional Assistants Association), and founder of the VA Resource Exchange.

She's also the principal of My Creative Assistant (MCA), a multi-VA firm that partners with Internet marketers, coaches, authors, speakers, and real estate professionals, and she's co-author of The Business of Being Virtual: Industry Leaders Reveal Their Virtual Assistant Business Secrets.

What made you want to become an entrepreneur?

I'm pretty sure I was born with the entrepreneur gene. My father was a carpenter and acoustic specialist, and ever since I can remember, he's had his own business. I remember one day going to work with him when I was six or seven, and he took me to a driving range, and I thought, "Man, this is what I want to do when I grow up!" It was a lot of fun.

I've always been surrounded by entrepreneurs. My sister is an interior designer and has her own business. A lot of my friends have their own businesses, so it's kind of a natural for me.

I don't do well with a boss, because I hate to be micro-managed. I'm a real free-thinker and very self-motivated, so I don't need that boss in front of me. I started off mainstream. I worked in offices and moved very quickly up to senior management as marketing director and office manager and those types of positions, and I was just getting tired of all my ideas being squashed, because they were a little more risky or not very


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http://www.businessofbeingvirtual.com/

http://www.mycreativeassistant.com/

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http://www.canadianva.net/

http://www.pamivey.com/

traditional.

I found this program called SE in Canada, and it's the self-employed assistance program, and they let me go back to school, and they paid me. I became certified in small business management, and I opened my own faux finishing and painting business, but unfortunately, the paints we had to use back then were all alkyd- or oil-based paint, and I was allergic to them, so after a couple of years, I had to sell the business.

I went back to work for "Corporate America" and hated it, met my future husband, and his family had a business. I slid into that business as an operations manager, pretty much as my own boss. That marriage broke down, and I went on my own. I was a web designer and graphic designer, and I stumbled across this term "virtual assistance," and I thought, "I can do that! That's me! That's exactly what I'm doing." That was in February 2001, and I've been doing that ever since.

What do you think has been the one thing that you've gotten right as a solo entrepreneur?

Well, I think it's a struggle as well as a success, but I have what I call "Shiny Object Syndrome" or "SOS." They call me a serial entrepreneur, but it's true. That has been a hindrance, but I'm learning how to deal with it to make it an asset. I always had this problem with never being able to focus on one thing. I'd get really bored very quickly, but now with a multi-VA team, it's allowed me the time to pursue all these ideas that I get.

What's your strategy for overcoming "SOS," as you call it?

I'm finally getting it out of my head and onto paper. I always used to have things swimming around in my head. I'm putting down all the major projects I want to work on, and then I prioritize them. I'm trying to focus on three main projects at a time, and it's incredible how much that has helped me to focus. I have a huge whiteboard, and I have the three main things I'm working on and all the stuff I have to do underneath them, and I try to do at least one thing per major project per day. It's amazing how that simple exercise has helped me.

What's one thing you wish you would have known before starting your business?


http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/epb/sid/cia/grants/self-emp/desc_self-emp.shtml

This is so easy, finding my niche market, narrowing down to very specific people. When I first started my business, I used to say that I would sell my service to anyone with a heartbeat and a wallet, and I'll tell you, that wasn't very successful. Once I discovered a niche, actually the real estate niche as a virtual assistant, my business absolutely skyrocketed, because I honed my message, I learned the lingo and how to speak to those people, and I got in front of them. It helped me tremendously to really identify my ideal clients.

We always evolve. You don't have to stick with one thing. I do a lot of mentoring with new VAs, and I really urge them to find out what their passions are - what their hobbies are, their interests, what really gives them steam - and focus on that market. As the saying goes, work on something that you love, and you'll never work a day in your life.

What do you think are your greatest strengths and weaknesses at this point?

Well, we talked about my ADD, and that's definitely one of my weaknesses, but I'm learning how to turn that into more of a strength. The strategy, the way I think, is a real strength for me, because I can come up with those ideas, but I can also come up with a good project and implementation matrix to make it happen. Thinking through all the steps, kind of looking at it from 3,000 miles up and seeing the big picture to see all the little pieces that have to go into it, I think, is one of my biggest strengths.

You obviously believe in the power of outsourcing and concentrating on your core tasks.

Absolutely. It took me a while to get there, but it's one of the best things that I did for my business. My VAs have afforded me that time to really concentrate on what I love to do, and things like bookkeeping and things that I hate, somebody else does that for me.

How important are systems to your business?

I never really thought about systems, honestly, before. I had to do them when I was in Corporate America, and I hated them, but owning a multi-


VA business in particular, it's critical for me to have systems so that if a new team member jumps on my team, I can hand them process documentation, and they get it right away. I don't have to spend hours training. Also, I create a lot of different products, and if I didn't have a system, I'd be creating the wheel every time. Systems are so important to save us time and sanity. I just go, "Okay, I have this created. Now, I have to this to promote it, and this is next." I check them all of the list, and I don't have to think about it. I just do.

Each time I do something new, the Systems Chick has taught me, I actually do screenshots and everything else so that I have a complete process document so that my 19-year-old son, who has no interest in any of it, could pick it up and do.


As I mentioned before, definitely do something that you love, have systems and processes, and keep your books up-to-date. I can't stress that enough. I went a whole year without doing any bookkeeping one year, and it was a nightmare to get caught up. Even if you're not doing them yourself, get somebody else to do them.


http://www.systemschick.com/

valerie fitzgeraldof The Valerie Fitzgerald Group

In this interview, I caught up with Valerie Fitzgerald, a twenty-year real estate veteran and president of The Valerie Fitzgerald Group, a Beverly Hills Coldwell Banker real estate firm.

Valerie is also the author of the recently published book Heart and Sold: How to Survive and Build a Recession-Proof Business.

Tell me about your business and how you got you got started.

I represent buyers and sellers of residential real estate in about thirteen different markets in southern California. This is my twentieth year. I started this business by myself, when I first came to Los Angeles. I grew up here, but I lived in New York for many years. I came to Los Angeles actually for a cosmetic company, and about three months, four months after I was here, they said, "I'm really sorry, but your position has fallen through."

I had moved here with my daughter, who was a little baby, and I had nothing underneath me. I had an apartment in New York that I had leased out for two years, so "Oh my gosh, what am I going to do here in California?" I had been gone for quite a while and didn't really know anyone. I had no business education, no business background, no formal training of any kind, and a friend of mine said, "Just go into residential real estate." I thought it was crazy at first, "I don't know people, and I don't know contracts." I certainly didn't have any money.

I had to work it out. I started to meet some other mothers, who were stay-at-home moms who could help me and trade some hours and take care of my daughter, so then I started to go to school to get my license at night.

In real estate, especially, you need to have a network of people to call upon to be able to build a client base. How did you get started being new in the area?





http://thevaleriefitzgeraldgroup.com/

http://thevaleriefitzgeraldgroup.com/

http://valeriefitzgerald.com/

I did not have a network at all. I didn't know very many people. If I knew three or four people, that would be a lot. To get going and build that network, you have to get out and meet people. You have to get out and do things. I met someone who said, "While you're waiting to get your license, come and work in my office." It was a small, boutique office, and I went to work there. I'd have to bring my baby to sleep under my desk after three o'clock in the afternoons, because that was my trade-off deal with one of the moms.

I'd cold call, and I'd get on the computer and try to learn the market and the numbers and the addresses and things like that. I used to drive around and leave notes on people's doors. I'd write down developers phone numbers. I would call the developer, until one guy finally relented and said, "Okay, fine. Come. Meet with me." I went to meet with him, and he didn't know I was going to bring my baby with me, so I arrived there with her and the diaper bag and briefcase, and I was walking up the stairs in my high heels, and one of my high heels broke off. Just as I lean down to pick it up, this woman comes down and says, "Oh, he's ready to see you." I throw my shoe in the diaper bag and pull off the other one and go in in my bare feet, and I'm carrying her and mumble that my babysitter was sick, put her on the floor, and started talking to him about business. He actually ended up giving me the chance to sit in one of his houses and hold it open, and it was a big listing, brand new house, and I guess he gave me the first chance to prove myself. I did. I met lots of people and started building my database that way. He eventually let me list the property, so it kind of gave me my start.

Where did the book come in?

Michael Gerber wrote The E-Myth Revisited, and he wanted to do an experiment on something called "The Dreaming Room." He had a small group of us come up to northern California, and we went to this convention room, and he said, "Okay, we're going to do this little experiment called 'The Dreaming Room.'" He gave us a piece of paper and all these coloring things, and he said, "Okay, here we are. We're in the dreaming room." He put some music on and said, "I'll see you later," and he walks out the door.

There were like twenty of us, who kind of look at each other and think, "What kind of experiment is this? What are we doing here? We've got



crayons and pens and a big pad of paper, like coloring paper. Okay? I guess we're supposed to dream."

I drew certain things, tall buildings, the ocean with a boat, a book. The process, over the weekend, was "How do you dream?" Dream like a kid. Kids dream from scratch. They're like little sponges. They have nothing that stops them from dreaming, "I want to be a fireman."

Out of that came this whole idea, "Wow, a book!" I didn't really think much more about it. I've done a lot of media, speaking to women, over the years, and I got a phone call one day from an editor at Simon and Schuster. She said, "I saw you on this show about empowering women. Have you ever thought about writing a book?" I said, "No." She said, "Why don't you write me down a quick outline of what you think could be in the book and send it to me, and we'll see what happens." I did, and I thought it was kind of a lark, because I did it quickly. I thought it was an outrageous idea that landed in my lap, but then she was like, "Okay, we're going to buy it," and all of a sudden, I'm committed to write a book!

I wrote at night, and I did it long hand, until two or three in the morning, and then I'd get up and go to work, so those days were a little blurry-eyed, but it came together, and the book was finally released this past May.

Talk a bit about strengths and weaknesses over your career path.

As an entrepreneur, you can't do everything yourself. You have to learn how to delegate. You have to build a team. I would always tend to pick people that I could be friends with. I didn't learn, for a while, that you pick people that have different strengths than you and not necessarily someone that you'd want to go hang out with. I was hiring from more of an emotional place than for the quality of person applying and for their abilities and how they fit.

My strengths? I'm very organized. I'm very straightforward. Another strength is that I don't take things personally. At the very beginning, that was a weakness. When I was first starting out, I took things very personally. I've learned to step back, and I'm usually very calm. It takes a lot to get me charged up in a business situation.


What do you wish you would have known earlier on?

I wish I would have learned more about what the costs of things so that, many times, those costs didn't get away from me. The cost of doing business was expensive, and I didn't budget. It was a roller coaster. Real estate is so unpredictable. One minute you've got a commission, and the next minute, you don't. I did not pay attention to the expense side of building a business for quite some time.

What would be your best advice for new solo entrepreneurs?

I think everybody has to have a dream and follow that dream. You have to have something that you want so badly and that you can believe in. My daughter was my source that drove me. I was going to make a life for us. I was going to be successful, and everything engaged in my senses to make that happen. You've gotta feel connected to something inside yourself that will hold you through the times that you don't give up, so you won't give up, and you'll find the different paths, if this one isn't working. I believe in blind faith.

There's room for everybody. That's the beauty of it. When you're an entrepreneur, there's no discrimination. It doesn't matter how old you are, how big you are, what accent you have, what race you are. It doesn't matter. There's room for everybody. It just takes the heart and soul to go get it.


josephine geraciof My Mom Knows Best

In this interview, I spoke with Josephine Geraci, a former Wall Street executive and founder of My Mom Knows Best, maker of gLovies®, which help protect kids from germs in public places.

How did gLovies® come about?

When my child was two-years-old, I took him into the restroom for the first time after he was wearing his "big boy" underwear. We went into the restroom, and I was completely horrified at everything he touched. No matter how much paper I put on the toilet seat, his fingers were still gripping the bottom. Just the thought of his hands on that toilet seat, I said, "There must be a better way. There's gotta be something on the market that can protect our children from germs in public places." I researched it, and there was absolutely nothing on the market. That's when I decided I would create a solution to a problem.

The fact that I had a concept in my head, and to actually see my product on the shelves in some of the largest baby retailers, I still can't believe it.

How did you go about the initial promotion of your product?

I still feel like I'm in the initial phase. I had a lot of time spent in the development of my product. There was a lot of legal work involved in getting my product to where it is now. As far as getting the word out there, I would talk to people. I would respond to leads that I would get. What is amazing is that I got a phone call from a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. It was a very simple interview that I had with him, and it went okay, but I felt that there were some questions that I wanted to expand upon, so I took the time to spend expanding on all the questions that he had asked, and I emailed it to him. He was so appreciative that I put so much time and effort into his interview that he wrote an incredible article and quoted me in the article, and next thing


http://www.mymomknowsbest.com/

http://www.mymomknowsbest.com/

you know, the producer of ABC Nightline News read the article and called me and said he wanted to come and interview me. I had the crew of ABC Nightline News here interviewing me in my home, and it was just a snowball effect.

I was on national TV on Friday night, and they decided to replay it on Good Morning America the next day. Then I had the local newspapers coming to me and magazines coming to me. That's how I'm getting my name out there, and I have an awful lot of mom bloggers contacting me, and there are people Googling "how to keep kids safe from germs," and they end up on my website, so slowly but surely, gLovies® is becoming a common word around them. It's quite interesting to me.

What do you think is one thing you're getting right so far as a solo entrepreneur?

As of right now, when I look at my business and at my life, I feel that I've managed to come up with the right balance. At first, when I came up with my business idea, I mistakenly thought I was still single in Manhattan, ready to conquer the world, and I could get this business up and running in no time, and it would be a success very, very quickly. Then I realized that I decided to get married and to have children, and they are my #1 priority, so it's not that my business is not going to be successful, it's just going to take a little longer. Once I accepted that fact, I calmed down internally. Instead of always worrying, "Well, I should have sent out ten marketing kits today," I just decided, "You know what, life is short. I'm going to enjoy my family, and I'm going to create a balance." Once I did that, I established a schedule, and I decided, "These hours, I will dedicate 100% of my attention to work, and these hours I will focus 100% on my family." I feel proud of myself that I've figured out that balance.

I hired the right people to help me run my household as well. That was important. I saw Bobbi Brown, the makeup artist, on TV about three years ago, and she was giving advice to entrepreneurs. She said, "The best thing you can do is hire the best help for your home, because if your home is run smoothly, then it allows your business to run smoothly."

What are the things you struggle with?

I have recently realized that I can't do it all by myself, if I want to bring my


http://www.bobbibrowncosmetics.com/

business to the next level. I decided to hire a coach, and it's just working out incredibly well. That's helped me bounce ideas off of a professional, and they're like my own little cheering squad. What I've learned is that it's just so important to work on your business and not in your business. My weakness was that I was working in my business.

I just actually outsourced my accounting, and I've been sleeping better, because I've outsourced it to someone who's even smarter than me in accounting. That's not my expertise. That's all off my back. I won't have to spend my own time doing that.

I'm creating a dream team. I want people who are excited about my product and business, people who take pride in what they do, and people who are qualified. Hiring the dream team and hiring qualified people is just so important.

If you could start over, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

The biggest expense was legal expenses. If you have a patent pending, it does bring value to your product, but I probably would have gotten my product on the shelves and selling before I invested such a large amount of money in my legal fees. Once I get my patent, it will be valuable, but it was an awful lot of money. I wish I would have talked around. I wish I would have interviewed more attorneys. I think that was my biggest lesson learned.


First, know what you're good at and what you're not good at, and don't try to kid yourself. Be brutally honest with yourself and [if you can] say, "I know how to do this. I am really good at this, I am the best person to do this, and I enjoy doing this," then by all means, go have fun and do it. If there's something that you're so-so about, let's just say sales, and you think, "Well, I've always done sales, and I can do this by myself," the truth of the matter is, you might not be the right person to sell your own product. Just be honest and say, "Let me just hire a distributor or some sales people." You have to put the ego aside. Decide what you're good at and focus your time on doing that.


Second, follow your intuition. I think that your gut will always lead your business in the right direction. There were times when I just felt like, "You know what, I really just need to go after the big guys," and people were like, "Oh, it's a brand new product. You haven't sold it any place else." I said, "What have I got to lose?" I went for it, and I got it. You have to follow your own gut.

Finally, for all those people out there who have always dreamed of owning their own business, finances are super important, but if you're on the fence and really think you can swing it, it's amazing what you would give up in order to follow your dream. We go through life one time. It is so short. It's important to do what's going to make us happy. Give it a shot. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. You move on to the next thing. There are so many entrepreneurs out there who are super successful, but they would be the first to tell you, "I did become successful off my current business, but I had two failed businesses before this successful business." You just have to have the guts and go after your dream. If it doesn't work, you pick up the pieces and move on to the next thing.


erin lazanoof Green Sherpa

In this interview, I spoke with Erin Lozano of Green Sherpa, a web-based cash flow management and budgeting solution that helps people make better financial decisions about how to save and where they spend their income.

Tell me a little about your business and how you got your start as an entrepreneur.

I have a company called Green Sherpa, and it's a software company. We make a personal cash flow management program. It tracks financial history, helps create a budget and financial plan, and helps facilitate financial conversation.

Green Sherpa was born out of my almost fourteen years now of what I call "cash flow analysis." I would meet with couples mainly. Almost 100% of the time, women would hire me because they were going through some kind of life change, so they were getting married, having a baby, going back to school, wanting to buy a house. There was some kind of financial impetus for them to take a look at their finances for sometimes the first time or feeling like they were in some kind of state of chaos and needing to make some sort of life change.

I created a process that I would walk people through and then help them have more meaningful conversation around their money with their loved ones. Out of my practice, I developed this very specific process, and we turned that process into a software program.

How did you go from having this process to creating software around it? That seems like it would have been an intimidating step.

Yes, you know, it actually came out of a coffee conversation with my best friend who has had a software company for the past fifteen years. He and I had coffee two and a half years ago. The conversation came out of me sharing that I had made a list of things that I wanted to do about eight years ago, and I had done everything on that list except for turn this process into either a software program or a workshop. He said, "We


https://www.greensherpa.com/

should do that. We should turn it into a software program." He and I are 50-50 partners in Green Sherpa, and he, of course, brings the technical knowledge. I bring the financial knowledge, and together we've co-created this. It's definitely never something I would have done on my own.

It really speaks volumes for the value of connections. You wouldn't necessarily equate what you were doing with this person who seems to be in a completely different industry. Sometimes people have trouble connecting the dots. You don't really realize how you're able to help each other and make new products and services out of those connections.

Exactly right, in fact, I write a column, and we're turning a lot of those articles into a book based on the idea of what I call "The Spiral Concept," which is if you talk to women entrepreneurs, they will tell you, "I did this because I had this conversation with this person, and they knew this person." We are so connected to our community, and we reach out, and as far as I'm concerned, Green Sherpa gets done every day because of the people that are in my community and know someone who they think might be able to help. It's such a female way of doing business. We're not as linear in our drive. We're more matrix-oriented. We get there at the same rate as male counterparts, but the way that we get there is very different. The way we get there is through relationships. It's more community-supported. I strongly believe in the value of connections.

At the beginning of your career, is that how you got your start, with people you knew?

The very first gift I ever asked for was a calculator, and I got a huge adding machine, and I still have it. From a very early age, business and numbers always appealed to me. I was a student at Berkeley, and I was an anthropology major and studying patterns of behavior around commerce and trade was really my focus, but I was an anthropology major. I took accounting classes, because I loved that and decided after college that I would just put it out there to people who knew me, "I don't have a CPA certification." I was taking additional classes when I graduated in accounting and thinking, "Maybe I'll get my CPA certification," but really I just wanted people to know, "This is what I really love to do. I love doing this forensic style of accounting. I love going into


really messy financial situations and cleaning it up and helping people create systems that they can see where they've spent and help them create better financial decisions for their future." People would say, "You should go into financial planning," and I really decided that retirement planning and financial planning was just not my love. My love was this forensic, detailed, get in the mess of it, and help people see the patterns of their behavior around money. When I was in college, just talking to people about what I loved to do, I got ten clients. That was the kickoff for me.

It's really interesting how you were able to stick with what you loved, that very specific niche, and not be influenced by those around you or by feeling compelled to have a label, like becoming a CPA or financial planner.

It is. It really is a testimony for "do what you love, the money will follow." Figure out what you really love to do and then just do that, no matter what. Just stick to it. Stay focused. Stay passionate about what you do all the way through, and it will pay off.

And, I think we all have a tendency to want to cubbyhole people, just so we can compartmentalize things, but breaking out of that is probably one of the things that has led to your success, being able to not conform to those categories and create your own category.

Exactly right, by not being labeled, I definitely didn't go down any of those roads. I was able to fill a niche. I found something that no one else was paying attention to.

What do you think you're getting right as an entrepreneur?

Staying on track. It's kind of like that feeling I had in college. There are always going to be people who compare us to our competitors as a way of discouragement. There are always going to be the naysayers. What I think we've done really well is knowing that we hit on something two and a half years ago, and we're going to stay true to that.

Also, building a company and product that will be viable on its own. We have a very, very low number of subscribers that we need in order to be profitable. It's always been part of our DNA to build something that was


profitable and sustainable.

We've done a really good job at staying on track with who we are, what we're building, the niche that we're filling, and staying true to who our demographic is.

The other thing I think we did really, really well and was a really smart move was to test our market, because we certainly started going down one road and decided, "No, that's not a viable market space."

What would be your advice for new solo entrepreneurs?

Most entrepreneurs have a higher comfort level for risk than most employee-minded folks do, but there are a lot of employee-minded folks who have great ideas. They get started with a great idea and end up feeling incredibly discouraged and frustrated and uncomfortable a lot of the time. Test your own gauge. Test your own comfort level with risk. Be really honest about your skill set. Do something that really falls within that sweet spot of what you do really well and just stick with that.

You can be goal-oriented. You can be driven, but if you're not passionate about what you're doing and you're not in that sweet spot of your skill set, you're going to always feel like you're picking yourself up by your bootstraps and doing it anyway. The minute I feel that, I think, "Something's not quite right here." Either I'm doing something I'm not very good at, and I need to ask for help, or I'm doing something I just really shouldn't be doing.


pearl mattensonof PearlMattenson.com

In this interview, I spoke with Pearl Mattenson, a leadership and relationship coach serving leaders, teams, partnerships, and couples along a path to better communication and positive change in their lives and businesses.

Tell me a little about your business.

I'm a leadership and relationship coach; I primarily work with new heads of non-profits, and/or their leadership team and/or their board. Usually, for those that are new leaders, it's about getting their leadership legs and figuring out, "What does it mean for me to run this organization in a way that makes sense for me and

not feel like it's totally overwhelming my life?"

My relationship coaching is working with professional partnerships and teams on the non-profit side, although sometimes I work with small business owners and their staff. I also work with couples, and I really love that work. It's very different than the professional coaching work, although what is similar is that people are just not able to communicate with others in a way that feels true to them. More often, they feel they have to behave or talk in a way that meets other people's expectations. When couples or professionals work with me, they're ultimately able to speak in a way that feels really true and to have much more honest relationships.

It seems that you're doing something that you're truly passionate about, which can make all the difference.

I am hesitant to make the point that if you follow your passion, the money will follow, because it's not always true, but I guess my view is that if I'm not doing something that I care about, life can be deadly. It's too short to wake up every morning and be miserable about what's ahead of me, so I not only want to be excited, I want to really care about what I am doing. I want both my head and heart engaged. On the business end of this,


http://www.pearlmattenson.com/

what I have learned, and am only now willing to see, is that when I'm truly engaged, that has a positive impact on my client base. The word-of-mouth for my business will spread faster when people connect with me because they see me as someone who is really passionate about what she does. You want to work with somebody who brings that kind of commitment to what they're doing. I do. I didn’t strategically set out to be passionate about something that would bring me financial success, but I know that it an equation that works.

What has most helped you develop a vision and plan for your business, to kind of approach it more strategically?

The smartest thing that I did was to find a coach (Laura West of the Center of Joyful Business) who had been a marketer, and her whole coaching business was focused around helping women entrepreneurs market their business. I was guided by her wisdom to choose what worked for me, and what she helped me to see was that I can be systematic and still do it in a way that's natural and true to me. For me, marketing was about relationship-building. That was a huge first step for me in being able to move forward in launching my business.

What have you found to be the most successful ways to market your business?

One is that I stay very connected. I maintain a very wide network and seek to keep adding value to that network. With all the various social networking vehicles that we have, it's become so much easier to do that. The goal is to see how I can be helpful, and that has been huge for me, to offer value where I can. I'm always looking for the opportunity to add value.

The other thing that's been important for me, and I probably haven't emphasized it as consistently, is my writing. I have a monthly newsletter, and there was a time when I wrote for another blog site. My subscriber list grows incrementally each month.

Those things, staying in relationships with people and adding value as well as putting my writing out there about the issues I think and care about have been the most helpful in generating business for me.


http://www.joyfulbusiness.com/

What's something that you struggle with in your business?

I think my weakness, and this is going to sound really silly, is my struggle with the belief that my success is dependent on the space in which I work. My home office has no walls, and I have just battled with this home office space, thinking, "If only I had doors and walls, I would function totally differently. I would take my business to a whole other level." It even gets reduced down to, "If only I had the right planner, if only I had the right setup on my desk," so really this inane belief that my space and what I'm surrounded with is critical to my business has been a huge distraction. I'm not going to say it's irrelevant, because it certainly has an impact, but I have elevated it to new heights of importance.

The other thing that I've struggled with on more of a daily-grind level is learning how to say no to the wrong clients. There are clients who show up at my door who are not right for me, and in my early years, I stayed with clients who I knew were not right for me for far too long, sometimes because I thought I needed the income and sometimes because I didn’t want to feel like a failure if I could not serve these particular clients. Over time I've gotten better, with turning away clients, but it's still a struggle. I certainly refer these people to other resources, but too often I struggle with trusting my gut. I think, "Well, maybe I can help this person, and maybe I'm not reading them right," and then end up with a client who costs me more hours than what they're paying for.

What do you consider to be your strengths as an entrepreneur?

I refuse to book myself solid. I've learned how to manage my energy and my spirit. I schedule breaks and open-ended time for me. I'm a person who needs a lot of solitude. I have two high school kids, and they're gone for quite a significant part of my day, so I make sure that I have open spaces for quiet time. I also have my own coach, and I take time for other things that I know fill up my spirit. I spend time outside. I reconnect with family and friends. I simply could not run my business if I were not able to manage my energy. So much of what I do in my work is about being completely present and available for my clients. If I don't take the time for me, there's no way I could service my clients.

What's your best advice for new entrepreneurs?


Know that you can't do it alone. You need to reach out and find support in all kinds of ways. You just can't do it alone. The idea that you're going to start a business totally on your own, I think, is a complete misnomer.

The other thing is integrity. Don't sell it if it isn't right for the customer. You need to be in integrity with what you can really stand behind and feel good about. You can't be everything to everybody, so don't try to be. Stay in integrity with what it is you're offering, and that's going to serve you best in the long run. People really value high-integrity business owners. You stand out when you're a business owner with integrity.

Finally, right from the get-go, if you have people who appreciate what it is that you have to offer, get testimonials. Having written testimonials makes an impact.


shannon laackmannof Psychic Cowgirl

In this interview, I spoke with Shannon Laackmann, Psychic Cowgirl, intuitive counselor, and rancher who helps her clients figure out their hopes for the future and then gives them the tools to empower them to achieve it.


I am the Psychic Cowgirl, and I'm an intuitive counselor and a spiritual healer. I use my talents to connect to universal energies to inspire, motivate, and empower people, mostly women. A lot of my clients actually

end up coming to see me because they're in abusive relationships or had abusive situations, and they just want to get rid of all that crud that's in their life. My passion is empowering people, especially women, and my biggest message is letting them know that they're not alone on this journey, that we do actually have a team of heavenly helpers, if we just know how to listen and tune in to their guidance. They send us messages constantly, and it is really empowering to know that you're not alone and that you have access to this unconditional love.

How did you get started in this line of work?

I've always been able to do this. I just focused on what my passions really were and what I did naturally, and it just kind of evolved.

A lot of people have a problem connecting their talents and their passions with a business opportunity, and they worry that they are going to be able to, in fact, find clients and find people who are going to be willing to pay for their product or service. It seems that you were able to get passed this.

I had to get rid of my limiting beliefs before I could do this.

Did you kind of set goals for yourself, as far as what you wanted to accomplish?


http://www.psychiccowgirl.org/

http://www.psychiccowgirl.org/

I made my dream board, and I wrote how I wanted my business to make me feel, how I wanted it to work (it had to work on the Internet, and I had to just do work on the phone, and people could come in person, but it had to be a little more flexible than having a storefront), so I made my manifesting list and my dream board, and I just focused on it and became aware of opportunities as they came up - paying attention.

So, it was more about how you wanted your life to be rather than specific goals or outcomes for the business itself?

When I started, I did get tangled up in trying to do it the traditional way and setting specific goals, and it didn't work for me. All it did was make me upset, so I had to figure out a better way.

So, how do you approach your day then? With traditional goals and set milestones and metrics, you obviously break those down into concrete steps that you have to do on a daily basis to move the business forward. How do you focus your day coming from this direction?

I still have lists and things I want to accomplish. I still do short term goals. The difference is, I don't attach to the outcome. If it doesn't work that way, I don't beat myself up over it. I show compassion for myself and say, "Okay, there's a purpose it doesn't work that way. Let's figure out how to make it work a different way."

It seems like it's really about getting out of your own way. How did you accomplish that?

I paid attention to my energies, and when I could feel that it wasn't working, I didn't try to force it to work. I let it go and tried to figure out how to make it work in another way that did feel good in my energies. When I realized that my perspective is unique and I have to figure out what feels good to me and work from that point, that's when I found success.

Well, that seems to be one thing that you're getting right in order to attract success. What else do you think that you're getting right in helping to build your business?

Attracting people that have different strengths than I do so that I'm able to focus on what I'm strong at, and anything I'm weak at, they come


along and help me fill those gaps. When you're a solo person in business, you think you can do it all yourself. Until you realize that trying to do it all yourself is actually sabotaging you, because you don't have time to focus on the things you're good at, you get bogged down in these details that you may not be so good at.

What do you find are the most helpful things to outsource in your business?

I always try it first. I try it, and if I find that it's dragging my energy and I'm just getting cranky doing it, those are the things that I outsource to my virtual assistant.

How about things that you struggle with?

Blending the whole business and family and ranch and everything that I do, that's a big one. That's where being able to be flexible helps, you know, because some days, the cows get out, and I spend two or three hours putting them back in and fixing the fence, and I don't get to do ordering for the store and followups on clients.

One of the benefits of being an entrepreneur, though, is that you have that option of when your kids get sick, you can say, "I'm not working today." You don't answer to anybody else.

What lessons have you learned as an entrepreneur?

Be careful who you ask advice from, because some people have their own perspective that's not in alignment with yours, and if you try to force yourself to be in alignment with that advice, it's not going to work. Really know who you are and what your intention for your business is so that you have some sort of stable point that you can work from.




jill hartof Christian Work At Home Moms

In this interview, I spoke with Jill Hart, founder of Christian Work at Home Moms and co-author of the book, So You Want to Be a Work-at-Home Mom. Jill has worked from home since 2000 and started her own home-based business to assist other Christians who desire to work from home.

Let's start by talking a bit about your business and how you got your start as an entrepreneur.

I run a website for Christian work-at-home moms, CWAHM. I got married January 1, 2000. My husband was a systems administrator, and I realized early on that either I figure computers out or, literally, I would not be able to understand him for the rest of our married life. He started teaching me more about computers and how to design websites. By the end of that first year, I had designed the first version of CWAHM. It was right about the time that Google kind of came into its own, so people were starting to find me on Google and other search engines and contacting me about CWAHM. At the time, I had just been stocking the site with information about working from home, simply because that's what I wanted to do. It wasn't that I thought it would ever be anything. It was kind of an accident.

What made you decide to build an actual network?

Well, there were a lot of other work-at-home mom sites out there, but I had just graduated from a small Christian college here in Omaha, and I couldn't find anything else faith-based out there. I just started stocking it with information that I was looking for and thought was valuable, pretty much thinking no one else would ever see it.

I actually had to go back to work in 2003. Thankfully, it only ended up being for a few months, but I didn't know that when I first went back to work. We had a one and a half year old at the time, and I balled my eyes out on the way to work every single day and pretty much on the way home, too. I was absolutely miserable, and I think that's when it fully hit


http://cwahm.com/wordpress/

http://soyouwanttobeawahm.com/

http://cwahm.com/wordpress/

me that, "There are women that live like this and have no options." I realized at that point that I was really going to make this a resource that would help other women, and that's when the doors really sprung wide open, when I really understood that not only was this a good business option for me, but this was truly something that could help women.

How did the book come to be?

My faith played a big part in that as well. I woke up in the middle of the night one night with the idea for this book in my head. Three years later, four years later, I had like nineteen pages done, and I was at the point, "I'm either going to do this, or I'm going to get rid of it." I sent it to a good friend of mine, Diana Ennen who runs Virtual Word Publishing and is my co-author. I knew that she knew what she was talking about, both in working from home and writing books. I sent it to her and said, "Should I bother with this?" Being the very gracious person that she is, she said, "Oh yes, this is wonderful!" I asked her if she'd be willing to co-author it with me, and she agreed. We were able, within the course of about two years, to finalize things. Then I got a scholarship to a big Christian writers' conference out in California. I got the guts up to talk to one publisher who about a year and a half later bought the book. The journey was amazing.

Shifting gears, what do you think you're getting right so far as an entrepreneur?

I actually just started doing social media last December, and it has really changed and help grow my business, as far as building true relationships with people. Social media is really the name of the game right now. It helps me be more flexible. They say that one of the next big things is video, so I'm experimenting with that now. Last year, we went live with our podcast. Rolling with the punches and really making the changes is something I do well.

What's your best advice regarding social media?

When you're getting started in social media, follow some of the leaders in your industry. See what they're doing, how they're using it.

What are the things that you struggle with as an entrepreneur?


http://www.virtualwordpublishing.com/

Balance is always a struggle, especially when you're working from home. As a work-at-home mom, I think that's always going to be my struggle, balancing it all. Last year, I dealt with some pretty serious health issues, and I had to ask for help, and that was really hard for me. I think that's a struggle, too, knowing when to outsource and when to let go of things. Once I did it, I was like, "Wow! I really wish I would have done this a long time ago."

What do you wish you would have known before starting a business?

I wish I would have known how closely I really needed to keep an eye on my income, as compared to how much I paid in taxes. With the first few years, your business is growing, your profit is growing, and I was still paying in the same monthly payments to the IRS that my accountant had set for me at the beginning, not realizing that I myself needed to be keeping an eye on that and upping my own payments. I wish I would have kept a better handle on my taxes from the very beginning.

I also wish that I would have known how much harder it can be at times, not only to be a solopreneur but also to work from home, especially with kids. I assumed that because it was a choice I made that it would just work. Unfortunately, there's a lot of planning and help needed. There's a lot to think through. You have to think, "When am I going to get my work done? How is this going to work for my family? How am I going to make this work?" There's a lot of details that go into it. When I first started out, I was still in that dream land state, "This is going to be so much fun."


First, be honest. Be honest with yourself about what it is that you want to do, how you're going to do it, when you're going to do it, how you're going to pay for it. Think through all of that stuff, and just be as completely and utterly and painfully honest with yourself as you can.

Second, don't get so caught up in making an income or promoting yourself that you're not helping others. My very first advertiser told me early on, "What you give out in business comes back to you." I really took that to heart. When you're out there doing social media, look for ways you can promote other people. How can you help other people? The


people that you help generally want to help you back in some form or another.


shama kabaniof The Marketing Zen Group

In this interview, I spoke with Shama Kabani, president of the online marketing firm The Marketing Zen Group, formerly known as Click To Client.

Aside from consulting, Shama's company provides a one-stop solution for online marketing, including such things as outsourced marketing, search engine optimization, and content marketing.

First, tell me about your business and how you got started as an entrepreneur.

I run a full-service online marketing. Essentially, what we do is online marketing for our clients and other companies. I have academic roots. I was doing my graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and I did my thesis on Twitter and social networking. This was in 2006, and I was thinking, "This is amazing stuff. This is really going to change how people do business," but a lot of big companies didn't see it that way at that time, so I decided to start my own thing. I did consulting. When I was doing consulting, a big response we got from a lot of people was, "I love your strategy, but when we try to take it somewhere else for implementation, we see a big backlash. Marketing people don't understand web design. Web designers don't understand marketing. We really want to see bottom line results." I started to hire people and create a team.

What do you think you've gotten right so far, as you've been building your business?

We really practice what we preach, so when we say online marketing, that's essentially all we do. We don't have any other type of marketing but online marketing. We're on Twitter. We're on Facebook. We send out e-newsletters. We do the email marketing, and it's worked really well for us.

The other thing that has been one of the key elements is investing a lot back in the company, so people look at it and go, "Oh, wow! You're so


http://www.marketingzen.com/

successful. You have nine employees. You're probably taking a million dollars home," and I'm like, "I wish!" One thing about entrepreneurship is that the more you invest back into the business, the more long-term gains you're set up to have. That was really key for us, to make sure that we are continuously investing back in the company, so I'm making sure that our current clients are served and that we have the bandwidth to take more on continuously and still do a good job.

What are thing things that you struggle with at this stage in the game?

The issue for me at this point is really operations and team-building and making sure that we're serving our clients to the best of our ability, and that is a big one.

How are you working through that?

The nice thing is, I've never been much of a control-freak, so I have a good way of just saying, "Hey, you're responsible [for this]. Go have fun." I do have to take on a different role in the company.

I think what's also shifting is the kind of mentors and the people I surround myself with. When you're a small business, I think, it's kind of fun to be popular and to speak. These things are very exciting. As an entrepreneur, you realize that your time is extremely valuable, and while you want to help everybody in the world, you really have to watch the clock very carefully. To give you an example, before, when someone would ask me to speak, I was happy to do it, no problem. Now I'm a lot more picky about where I speak, who I speak to, what my schedule looks like. You tend to be more judicious with your time and resources as you grow, and you try to give more in a group sense, so I try to do more blogging, more videos. I try to share my expertise at a group level.

Right, in the beginning, you try to be all things to all people.

Right, and you realize you just can't. You've got to manage your time, and you do the best you can.

What's something that you wish you would have known earlier on?

I wish I would have known how important setting client expectations was


and how important it is to measure baseline. Online marketing is a long-term strategy. It is not short-term, overnight results, but it's so funny how people have that expectation. I wish I knew to educate my clients more than I did then. Also, setting a baseline, you don't know what you're improving on if you don't know where you started.


Learn to be an editor. Don't be a perfectionist. It's rare to get things perfect, but you continue and continue to edit, and that's what you want to focus on, the editor inside you. It's never going to be just how you want it. It's always going to be a work in progress, and I think the sooner you can embrace that, the better.

Entrepreneurship is an interesting road. It's definitely not for everyone. There are things people like about entrepreneurship, like working from home and flexibility, but there are other things that are a lot tougher about being an entrepreneur. You really have to look at it and say, "Am I comfortable with a changing role every day?" Entrepreneurship can look very glamorous. People think it's the yachts and you sitting on the beach every day with your laptop. I can't remember the last time I was on a beach. It's just not that glamorous, but it is a lot of fun, and it is very rewarding in its own way.


anastasia chomlackof AnastasiaPhotography.ca

In this interview, I spoke with Anastasia Chomlack, a lifestyle photographer near Vancouver whose work is truly fun and inspiring and demonstrates how passion can develop into a thriving business.


I'm a photographer, and I focus mostly on lifestyle. I do weddings and babies and maternity and families, and then recently we've been doing a little bit of travel and commercial work as well. I say we, I bring my husband

in to do a lot of my design for me, since we've grown, and he photographs weddings with me.

I know a lot of people who are very interested in photography, but it seems like making the leap from hobby to business is where people get hung up. How did you make that leap?

That's probably the question I get asked the most, "How do you make money doing photography?" I have to say, for us, we lucked out. It was just easy. We moved to a smaller town, and I had just had my second little boy, and I was, of course, taking photos of my children. I think it's a few things. One of them was just the place I was in. I was going to moms' groups, and I was getting to know a lot of the families, and if they would come over to our house and see pictures on the wall or if they'd go to a friend's house and see the pictures I'd taken of their kids, people started talking. Word of mouth just flew, and all of a sudden, my phone just started ringing, so I really just sat down over a cup of coffee with my husband, and we had the discussion, "Can we do this? Should I pursue this?"

The first thing I did was take a couple of online classes in Photoshop, and I spent hours and hours on the computer looking at other photographers, reading magazines, looking at kids' magazines, going to the library and getting out old photo books, and really just studying photography as an art. I knew I didn't want to be a typical portrait photographer. I wanted


http://www.anastasiaphotography.ca/

http://anastasiachomlack.typepad.com/

to do something different, so early on, I was able to find a style that I really loved, and I just pursued that style. I found a niche for myself early on.

How did you bridge the gap from doing what you're passionate about but still treating it like a business?

You can have all the talent in the world, but if you don't have a good business plan or a good concept of business or being an entrepreneur, I think people would find it very hard to succeed. I'm very lucky that way. My dad is an entrepreneur. I grew up watching him have his own businesses and saw his work ethic. Then early on, just in life and different things we did, we traveled a lot, and I worked in a few orphanages, and I always took the admin side of things, as far as the vision and, "How are we going to make this happen?" I've been a list-writer for as long as I can remember, and that really played well in photography. It was probably a couple of months before I sat down and thought, "This is taking off. I need to sit down and create a business plan." I went on a photography business forum and started asking questions to other photographers, "What do you do with this? How do you charge tax? How do you package things? What does your customer service look like?," everything that is the back end of photography.

How about approaching things like promoting your business, scheduling, and all the day-to-day things that go into keeping the business moving?

I do all of that at this point, but I definitely within the next couple of years will be looking for an admin assistant to be helping me do some of that, just because as we grow, the front end is as busy as the back end. I can be out there taking photos every single day, but I still need to be marketing myself, being on the blog. There's so much social networking that needs to be happening, not to mention the invoices and bookkeeping.

From a marketing standpoint, is your business growing purely from referrals and word of mouth, or do you see some other things that have helped you gain some traction?

Absolutely word of mouth and referrals have been huge for me. That is how I started and grew so quickly, but the other side of that has been my blog. Blogging consistently, posting photos, writing a little bit of personal


so that people get to know who I am before they hire me. I have anywhere from 500 to 1,000 hits on my blog a day. The blog has really given people a lot of interest. I think that has been huge. The other thing has been social networking - Facebook, Twitter, being super involved on the Web, being linked to other websites and other blogs.

What do you think you're getting right so far as an entrepreneur and as a small business owner?

There's a few things. One of them, again, is social networking. I think I jumped on at the right time, as far as making my blog, Twitter, and all of that a priority. The second is that I stayed true to myself and my style, and I've seen as the years have gone by that I've come into my style even more, and more people are interested, and I'm getting just the kind of clients that I want to get. The third thing, and I think that this is probably the most important, is that I've been incredibly generous within my business, and hopefully that doesn't sound conceited, but I would tell people again and again who are starting their business, "Be generous."

There are a few ways that I've done that. One is that I'm always generous with my clients. I always enlarge an image that I love from their session and give it to them for free. Part of that is great marketing. It will be hung on their wall, and it's an image I love of their family, and all of their friends and family are going to see it. I always pick the image that epitomizes my style and what my favorite one was. They're always so, so happy. Giving them little bride books or albums that they can tuck into their purses, giving wallet-sized images for the dads to put in their wallets to bring to work, putting their slideshows online for a long time so that they can send it to their friends and family to view - I want to do it, because I always love my families, but also, it's incredible marketing, just to be generous, be kind.

The second way that I've been generous is, I started a "Celebration of Life," and I offer a free session every month to a family in need, so this could be a single mom or a child who has just been diagnosed with cancer or a mother who has just been diagnosed with cancer or maybe just a family that's going through a hard time financially. I invite the community to nominate somebody, and I have a wait list, and every month I choose a new person, a new family, or a new cause. I love this. I get to shoot entirely for myself. There's no expectation. I've gotten a lot of work and referrals and recognition for this, which isn't the intention, but


absolutely has been incredible for my business. It really serves purposes all around. It serves my heart, and it's also been great marketing for the business as well.

In a way, it's almost a selfish thing, because you're getting so much out of it.

That's right. I always think those sessions are a little more for me than for anybody else.

But, at the same time, it lets the community and the world around you see what you're all about and just be inspired by your work. It's really a great thing that you've got going there.

So, how about struggles? What are the things that you feel you still don't quite have a handle on as an entrepreneur?

One is that I tend to take on a little bit too much. I think as a woman and as a business owner, that's pretty normal. I will just get caught up and decide we're going to do some huge promotion or take on some new project. Taking on too much at times and working too many nights, that's definitely a struggle. I can get wrapped up in the details, wanting everything to be absolutely perfect. A little bit of time management would be a huge help for me, and I think we're at the point where I need to have an assistant come in, and that's a transition. I'm going to have to give up control, and that's a hard transition for me. When you build something up from the start and it's your vision, it's hard to let go.

Is there anything you wish you would have known before you got started?

Sure, in some ways, my business just happened. I started taking photos, people started calling, I had a business. There are certain times that I wish I had been able to go, "I'm going to start a photography business," written out a business plan, gotten a business loan, and then walked into it. A lot of it I think you just have to learn as you go.

I also think we were a little bit job by job in the beginning. Now, I sit down and tell people, "When you're trying to figure out your pricing, this is what you need to think about." I could have jumped up to higher pricing earlier, had I known that I should be thinking about how much my


cameras cost to get cleaned or new equipment every year and how that all needs to be put into your pricing structure, even just learning, "How much time does this actually take me to do?"


Be okay with making mistakes. Also, get a community of people around you. Really network.


lynda monkof Creative Wellness

In this interview, I spoke with Lynda Monk, a registered social worker and life and wellness coach with Creative Wellness, whose services and programs support balanced living and well-being among those who help others.


My business is Creative Wellness, and I'm a registered social worker and life coach. The majority of my work is supporting people who

give a lot of themselves to others - helping professionals, leaders, busy professional women - to really step back and see how they're caring for themselves. How are they tending to things like life balance, stress management, what's fulfilling and satisfying in their lives? The real heart of it is the art of self-care, what's beautiful about taking care of oneself. So often people get busy and, without even realizing it, start neglecting their own needs and well-being, so my business is about helping them put that back on the radar and make caring for themselves a priority.

How did you get your start as an entrepreneur?

I got my start ten years ago. I was working as a social worker in a hospital, and while I loved my work as a front line social worker, I'd been doing that for almost ten years in a fairly high risk, high trauma work environment - child protection, children's mental health, working in the intensive care unit and emergency department of a hospital. While I liked that work, I really started getting more interested in how that type of work impacts the people who are getting out of bed every day doing it. How do social workers, nurses, doctors, other professional care givers take care of themselves while they're doing the type of work that's really caring for and tending to the emotional needs of others?

I decided instead of doing that work, I wanted to create my own business where I could support the people who are doing the work and help them prevent professional burnout and really tend to taking care of themselves


http://www.creativewellnessworks.com/

http://www.creativewellnessworks.com/

while they're in service to other people. I left my job, and I left the community I was living in, relocated, and created my business.

Let's talk a bit about strengths and weaknesses. What do you think are your biggest struggles as an entrepreneur?

Well, I would say weaknesses, one is that I give a lot away for free. For example, I produced a CD last year, and it cost me about $4,000 to produce, and I've given hundreds of them away. I also wrote a book earlier this year, and again, the book cost me about $2,000 to self-publish, and I've given many of those away. I give away lots of free coaching sessions, and so I think really claiming the value in these things and just paying attention. I think there's a weakness there around the amount of stuff I give away for free.

There are people who I consider to be very successful, and they don't necessarily wait until everything is perfect to take action. They just take action. They figure it out as they go, and they make mistakes, and they correct the course. I think I could benefit from doing more of that. I'm a real take action person. If I say I'm going to do something, I put a plan together and get it done, but I think for my big vision, my big dreams for my business, I can hold back a bit, kind of waiting until a bit more of it is organized.

So, those are sort of weaknesses or areas of growth.

What do you think you're getting right so far as an entrepreneur?

I think my strengths are that I'm pretty self-aware. I do my work with my own coach. I'm a regular journal writer. I really try to be paying attention to what's working, what isn't, and I'm a visionary. I really put a vision in front of myself and get down to it. I think my greatest strength is that I really take my business seriously. As an entrepreneur, you're working for yourself, and from the moment I started my business, I created a schedule for myself, and it's ebbed and flowed with the reality of my life, but I show up. If I've written in my day planner that I'm working from nine to four, I'm at my desk working from nine to four. I keep regular office hours. My business is part of my daily life, and that's really easy for me. I think it's a real strength. I'm highly self-motivated. I don't need external feedback or external pressures to put me into action.


What's your advice for new entrepreneurs?

I'm thinking of entrepreneurs that I've worked with in my coaching practice and often see a theme of getting lost in the small details. "How will I set up my filing system? What will my letterhead look like?" They'll get mired down in all of that before they really get cracking. I think it's really helpful, especially starting out, to start at the bigness. "What's my vision here? What's my purpose in the world? What do I really want my work and my business to accomplish? What impact do I want this business to have? Who am I here to serve?" Get really connected there, and then figure out the how. We often come at it backward.

It really is. When you start a business, you think in reverse. You start by going to the office supply store, thinking that that's where it begins. In the beginning, in the first few years, I spent so much time at the office supply store, thinking that the answer was there. Now I know that all that is just stuff. The answers aren't there. It's funny to think about it.

Right, and the other thing is the importance of being organized and systematized, this notion of setting up systems that work. That helps to have a sense of mastery so that the focus can be on the work, not all of the fiddling around.

The other piece, when I first started my business, I thought I knew what people would want. What I had to learn the hard way is that the best way to know how I can be of service to people and to know what they want and what's really important to them is to ask them. I have way more conversations now with my clients about what's up with them, challenges they're dealing with, problems that they're having, solutions they're looking for. How can I be a possible solution for them? I really engage in conversations that are much less about me talking about what I do and much more about what they want. That's made a huge difference.

Also, getting around other really successful entrepreneurs, people who are on fire about their businesses and their work in the world, that kind of inspiration and faith is so important. Really seek that out.


alison rhodesof The Safety Mom

In this interview, I spoke with Alison Rhodes, founder and brand ambassador for The Safety Mom and owner of Safety Mom Solutions. Alison lost her first child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 1997 and, since then, has become a tireless advocate for child safety.

Tell me a bit about your business and how you got your start as an entrepreneur.

My business is actually two parts. One is, I am a national child safety expert and really a family wellness expert, as well as a TV personality. I talk about everything from health and safety and wellness in newborns to teens. One of the things I realized is similar to how they say on a plane, "Put on your oxygen mask before you put on your child's," you really need to take care of yourself. As a mom, we have so many roles, and we get so stretched. We need to be that healthy role model for our families. I really believe that a happy mom is a happy family, so not only do I talk about health and safety for children, but really about the family and helping moms find that balance and happiness and health for themselves as well.

Unfortunately, the way I got started is, my first child died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 1997, and needless to say, that changed me profoundly. Prior to that, I was in public relations, so my gift is communication. After Connor died, it fundamentally changed me. So many people felt that I wouldn't want to talk about SIDS, because it hurt, but that was my healing. My healing was being able to give back and discuss it, because I felt like if I could save one child's life, I would have done something in honor of my son. I loved what I did, but I felt like I needed to do something to help save other children's lives and stop other parents from going through the kind of grief I went through, so I started a baby-proofing company, which is the other side of my business, Safety Moms Solutions. I have a baby-proofing company in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area. What we do is, we go in and not only install your typical baby-proofing items, but really work with a family on how to set up their home and look at everything, from managing their furniture


http://safetymomsolutions.wordpress.com/

http://safetymom.com/

and where it needs to be, to areas of concern specifically for that family and discussing SIDS risk-reduction measures. The other part is working with fabulous companies and promoting their products to moms and now actually starting my own line of co-branded products, Safety Mom products.

One of the big things for me is, I'm fortunate that I'm making a living out of this, but this is all about passion. I strongly feel that for any entrepreneur. You've gotta lead with passion. If you're not passionate about what you're doing, you're never going to succeed. I've been able to take what really was a horrific tragedy, but I was fortunate enough and blessed enough to see that this was sending me down the path that I was always meant to be on, and I can say, I absolutely adore what I do.

Obviously, PR is a big part of your company, a big part of getting the word out about it. What are some of your thoughts and recommendations about PR for other entrepreneurs?

PR is definitely the way to go, and the benefit entrepreneurs have right now is the explosion of social marketing. The first step is actually calling your local newspaper and TV outlet. They are always looking for stories of people in their community that are making it big, and they're always interested in focusing on that. The key is to find whatever tie it is that makes it into current events, so if you have a consumer product that's a great gift idea, start talking about holiday gifts. You never want to make it just specifically about you, unless it's a business roundup story. Find a larger story that can tie in with your product or service. They're always looking for stories, so pick up the phone, call your local newspaper, call your local TV station, and say, "Hey, I've got this great new product/service. I think your audience would be really interested in hearing about it. I'd like to talk with you about doing a segment." Start out locally.

What do you consider to be your greatest strengths as an entrepreneur?

I think there are two things. One is, because I came from Corporate America, I'm able to bring in some of those corporate best practices, but I'm also a really good big-picture thinker, and I can think in terms of marketing and strategy and what it's going to look like in five years, ten years.


I think the other thing I have going for me is that I am flexible. I understand that you can't get so committed to one vision that you don't open yourself up to other ways. I'm a strong believer that a higher spirit brings opportunities in your path, and you need to be smart enough to know to grab those opportunities when they present themselves.

What do you consider your biggest weaknesses?

When you have one of your kids home sick or on vacation, the mistake I make is trying to divide myself and trying to get some work done and trying to be with the kids. I end up getting frustrated and not doing either one well. I need to learn, on those days when the kids are sick or when something happens, work isn't going to get done, because I'm not going to be good in either role if I try to do both.

And then also understanding your own body rhythms. I'm definitely a morning person. I think this is another problem that I have. It's really crazy that at nine-thirty last night I was feeling guilty that I wasn't working and was taking an hour off to watch TV. I need to learn to give myself a break, because the reality was, at ten o'clock at night, would I have been creative enough to sit down and write the newsletter? Most likely not, so give myself a break. Get up early and start fresh and acknowledge that that's okay.

What do you wish you would have known before starting your business?

I think that I missed some of those foundation stepping stones from a legal and accounting perspective that I really should have had in place first. The other big mistake I learned, unfortunately, is that you can't go into business with friends. Sometimes you've got friends and family who are willing to help you out, but in the end, that can just absolutely destroy it.


People say, "It's so precarious to be an entrepreneur," but the reality is, it's way less precarious to be an entrepreneur. You control your own destiny. You see what's coming down the pike. You can walk into a corporation and lose your job tomorrow, so to me, you do have that destiny that you're controlling, but you also are able to manage and way better


understand how to incorporate your family into that.

When I talk to people that are still at my old job, where I was a senior executive at one of the largest PR firms, they're envious of me. They say, "Wow, you really did crack the code," because I work like a dog. I get up at five in the morning, and I will work all day, but when my kids come home, family time is from five to eight, and nothing gets done from a work perspective. Then after eight o'clock, I'll start working again, and it has allowed me to be with my children. My oldest has severe learning disabilities, and he needs my attention in terms of schooling, so I'm so blessed that I've been able to incorporate my family life into my entrepreneurship.

As long as you understand that it does take a thick skin, and you do have to be a little bit courageous, it's worth it.

One of the pitfalls I think entrepreneurs fall into is, they become so committed to their dream and their product, whatever it is, that they get blinders on, and they don't realize, especially in these economic times, you need to be willing to adjust and compromise a little bit and reinvent yourself as you go along. You can't get so set in that business plan. A business plan has to be evergreen, maybe go in a little bit different path than you were expecting, because that's the only way to survive. You have to have that foresight and that ability to be flexible.

And, it's interesting to think, early on in your career as an entrepreneur, you felt like you were floundering by doing that, by changing course and redirecting or making modifications to your business plan. You felt like you were floundering around and not succeeding, but now, I actually look at that as me getting closer to where I'm supposed to be.

Absolutely, and you do have to have that courage. It's difficult. There are a lot of people who are not cut out to be entrepreneurs. It does take a certain personality and a certain commitment, but boy, when it is right for you, you can't do it any other way.


pam kapoorof PamKapoor.ca

In this interview, I spoke with Pam Kapoor, a wordsmith and messagist who helps non-profit, community, and political organizations deliver expert writing, communications, and advocacy campaigns through their websites, promotional materials, and in new media.

Tell me a bit about your business and how you got your start as an entrepreneur.

Around five years ago, I wrapped up a contract and decided to take a couple of months to think about what I wanted to do professionally and reconfirm that I was headed in a direction that I would be excited about. The changeover in how I approached my work was finally waking up and realizing that I had the courage to do this on a freelance basis, and I really crystallized for myself that I wanted to do more writing. I parlayed some of my grassroots organizing or community organizing experience into a more focused area of professional pursuit.

The fields or areas in which I predominantly worked my whole professional life (non-profit, community organizations, political organizations, human rights organizations, women's rights organizations), a lot of the folks I had done work with over the years, provided the same kind of employment I was looking for. I developed a list of the types of things that I could do extremely well and identified myself as an invaluable resource to some of these organizations. For example, many organizations provide newsletters of some kind, and that's an obvious thing I could provide, as well as other writing, like for their website or promotional materials. My niche was public engagement or public awareness, and that's sort of how I tailored my pitch.

What methods do you use and recommend for finding new clients and promoting your business?

It's so important to stay networked, to stay linked and connected. Maintain an online presence. It's really just a matter of maintaining a


http://www.pamkapoor.ca/

presence in communities, be it on or offline. The other thing I'm trying to do is regular communication with former, potential, and existing clients.

I'm in the process now of making designing some kind of e-communication plan, whereby once a month or every few months I can connect with people with an update on what I'm up to, what I wish I'd be up to, and perhaps linking them to samples of my work.

The last thing is professional development, to try now and again to attend a conference or some sort of event where peers in my field or related fields are gathered. I have found that to be really important.

Let's talk about strengths and weaknesses, things you struggle with and things that you feel you're getting right so far as an entrepreneur.

For me, so much of my work has to do with particular sectors of non-profit, political, and advocacy organizations. Over recent years, they are struggling with resources and capacity issues, and I'm finding it more and more important to cast my net wider. The question for me is really about the follow through, how to be more proactive than I have had to be.

My strength is that, over this amount of time, I have finally gotten better at worrying less about money. If you're going to freelance or consult, the little panic about money is never going to go away. It just becomes one of the things that you have to manage. It's always going to be there, either quietly underneath things or really audibly in front of everything, but we have chosen a financially unstable work life. We've chosen it because there are so many things about it that we enjoy. There's always a sacrifice to be made. We've given up financial security, in the form of a bi-weekly paycheck that's automatically deposited into our checking accounts or vacation or sick pay. We've opted out of those things in order to get other things. It took me a while to kind of shrug off the more panicky feeling about that and to realize that things can happen magically, if you have the right attitude or intention.

What's your most important lesson or best advice for new entrepreneurs?

My cheeky answer to that is always, get dressed, but obviously that just applies to people who work at home. Routine and getting dressed is really important, creating time and space divisions in your house. Your


question is a bit broader than that, so my answer is balance. Ideally, people don't choose to freelance because they just can't get a job. It's a choice because you want to do other things with your life than just working. You opt to freelance so that you have space for other things. Many of us wind up struggling with balance to make that objective a reality. Work can be all-consuming. When you report to yourself, it's not always easy to insist on boundaries or take time off. I think it's very tricky, but very critical, to know what you want for balance. Understand that that can evolve. Then do everything in your power to insist that that balance be maintained, work-life balance and pursuing the things that we dreamed of pursuing when we decided to become a freelancer. If you've made a decision that you don't want to sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights from 8:30 to 4:47 every day, because you have other things that you want to do, then do them.


debbie whitlockof Sound Financial Partners

In this interview, I spoke with Debbie Whitlock, financial adviser and co-founder of Sound Financial Partners. Debbie has a passion for creating sustainable investment strategies for women in transition due to the death of their husband or partner or due to divorce.

In 2008, Debbie was named “Woman of the Year” by her broker-dealer, Woodbury Financial Services, Inc., for her

commitment to women and investing as well as her support of other women in the financial services industry.

Tell me about your business and how you got your start as an entrepreneur.

I am a financial adviser in private practice for a little over thirteen years now, and specifically inside my practice, I create personal strategies, investment strategies for suddenly single women who have experienced the loss of their spouse due to death or divorce. The whole opportunity to start my own business really came in 2002. The small firm I was with had changed its focus, and it wasn't in alignment with the clients I served and the vision I had for my future, so I worked out an arrangement to acquire a local business, and that's how my company Sound Financial Partners was born.

Let's talk about strengths and weaknesses. What are some things that you struggle with as an entrepreneur, and what do you feel that you're getting right?

One of my biggest flaws when I started this business was, in the beginning, I tried to do it all and tried to do it all myself. I never reached out and asked for help. In some ways, I'm really glad I spent those first two years so entrenched in the business, and yet, I feel like I lost two great years of traction, in terms of what really worked for me. The biggest thing I faced was learning to reach out and ask for help.

One of the strengths I have is probably seeing the big picture and then


http://www.soundfinancialpartners.com/

http://www.soundfinancialpartners.com/

being able to tactically develop a plan. That's been an interesting journey, too, learning that the business is me. I had this vision for a long time that the business and Debbie Whitlock were two separate entities, and nothing could be further from the truth. I am the business, so trying to use the strength of seeing that big picture and getting me from where I am to where I need to be, either to be of better service to my clients or to create more marketing opportunities or exposure for myself. That's been probably the easiest piece for me.

Kind of going back to the weakness thing, I can't remember who wrote the book, but I finally feel like I have the right people on the bus, and they're in the right seats. Once I knew that I couldn't do it all myself, I needed to find the people that could do the things I didn't do well and then put them in the right places to do that.

Probably one of the other things is, I'm not a brick and mortar sort of store, so I have some flexibility in terms of when I work. I had this weird idea when I first started my practice that I needed to be in my office at eight o'clock and leave somewhere around eight at night, and somewhere along the way, I came to the conclusion that there was no time clock, and no one was docking me, so create a schedule that works for me. I prefer to work earlier in the mornings. Trying to give myself permission to understand that when you are a solopreneur and you do have this flexibility that your work day and your world does not have to look like the eight to five, Monday through Friday guy, and that's part of the reason I enjoy so much what I do, is I do have the flexibility. The challenge that comes with that is, people can flex themselves right out of their business. They can give themselves permission to have so much free time that they don't create discipline and structure. Really having made a specific practice of focusing on structure, creating some scheduling and then sticking with that, things like that have really helped me out.

What do you wish you would have known before starting a business?

I don't know if it's so much as known, but I think what I wish I had done, I wish I had created as part of my business plan a specific tactical approach to building a network of advocates and supporters for myself and my work, again kind of going back to that feeling that I did a lot of things alone in the beginning, and I wish I hadn't. I wish that I had hired a business coach earlier. I wish that had been an investment I made much


earlier in the practice instead of two and a half, three years into it.

Being an entrepreneur can be really lonely. You've gotta surround yourself with people who are ready to bring their A game. Think about any major corporation. They have a board of directors. As a solopreneur, we don't do that, and then we wonder, "Why isn't this working?" Whether you call it a mastermind group or a board of direction or your accountability partner, you have to play with some people who are willing to give you 100% of what you need. It makes a huge difference in how you make decisions. You have just this wealth of knowledge and different perspectives, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

What's your most important lesson as an entrepreneur?

If I stay out of my own way, amazing things can happen. Perfection isn't necessary. Done is better than perfect. If we keep waiting for it to be perfect, it's never going to happen. If I just get out of the way and do what I know I need to do, it's amazing how easy my business becomes for me.


Do your due diligence. Study the competition. Take the time to create a business plan. Know what it's going to cost to operate and when you're going to be able to start drawing an income. If you don't do those steps, you really will end up with a very expensive hobby.


traci bissonof The Mom Entrepreneur and Bisson Barcelona

In this interview, I spoke with Traci Bisson, president and senior publicist of Bisson Barcelona, a public relations and social marketing firm that handles image management for authors and entrepreneurs. Traci is also the founder of The Mom Entrepreneur, a resource for women who are balancing motherhood with running a company.


I have Bisson Barcelona, which is a marketing and PR firm, and then The Mom Entrepreneur. Bisson Barcelona I started in August of 2000. The Mom Entrepreneur was started in April 2008. With Bisson Barcelona, our primary niche there is, we work with authors. We work in the literary industry, representing their images to the media. That company was started because I was working for actually a series of companies that went out of business. The first one I was with for five years, and eight weeks after I returned from maternity leave, they went out of business, and I was really left wondering, "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. It never even crossed my mind, because I was very used to working for the man, as they say, and was quite comfortable with it, felt very secure, and then everything fell apart. I decided to do some freelance work. I decided I needed to get more experience. I went back into the workforce on a temporary assignment with a corporation, and they laid off the department I was working with, so then I went to another company. About five months into it, I started noticing some of the same signs of problems in the company, so I decided to jump ship, and that was actually eleven days before 9/11. Three months after I jumped ship, they went out of business, and basically, at that point, after those experiences, I said, "There's no security working for other people," and I really felt that I needed to make a go of it on my own.

Kind of where The Mom Entrepreneur comes into that is, as I started Bisson Barcelona, I was a mom and an entrepreneur, so I was reaching out, looking for organizations and other entrepreneurs who were experiencing


http://www.themomentrepreneur.com/


http://www.bissonbarcelona.com/


http://www.bissonbarcelona.com/

the same struggles balancing motherhood and running a company. I found great resources for women in business, but nothing for moms in business, so The Mom Entrepreneur really grew from there.

What's your role within The Mom Entrepreneur at this point?

I would describe it at the moment as an online resource for women balancing motherhood and running a company, and under that umbrella is the online support group, the educational tele-seminar series, a series of blogs that we run, and a co-op shop that we've put together. Pretty much the whole premise of the organization has been to offer products and services that we find are needed by the members of our support group. It started out as a blog, and it grew into an actual website, but now it really is becoming an organization with companies underneath it that are working to create more products and services to help mom entrepreneurs.

How are you managing to juggle your roles between The Mom Entrepreneur and Bisson Barcelona?

My passion has really been The Mom Entrepreneur for a year and a half now, and my goal has been to try to transition out of Bisson Barcelona to The Mom Entrepreneur. The goal is to take Bisson Barcelona to an all online business. I've found that a lot of the success for The Mom Entrepreneur has come by harnessing technology and really taking advantage of what's available. Social networking is such a big thing. There are so many mom entrepreneurs that are online, so now I'll go back to Bisson Barcelona and develop an online support group, if you will, for the niche audience that we work with, which is authors.

Let's talk about strengths and weaknesses. What are some things that you have right as an entrepreneur, and what are things that you struggle with?

Well, at this stage, I've always felt that my strength has been my creativity. I've been able to come up with the newest, latest, and greatest ideas, in my mind, and do something to implement them, but I've always found that my weakness has been prioritizing them, so I'll come up with a great idea, but then there's all these other great ideas and members throwing great ideas at me left and right. It's sitting down and saying, "Okay, out of all these great things, what is going to benefit everybody the most," and I


find I try to spread myself too thin and try to implement several of them at the same time, but I found, when I did that, it didn't work.

Entrepreneurs, they're out there, they're thinking, they have creative juices flowing, and they want to start all these companies. I find, as a mom entrepreneur, what keeps me in check is my family. I can only work so much and can only do so much, because obviously, I'm a mom first.

What do you wish you would have known before getting started as an entrepreneur?

Probably the biggest one is understanding how to scale a business. We were in the literary industry, and we did not have a lot of competition, and we were kind of on the boom of everybody wanting to be an author. That was around the same time that all the vanity presses came out, so everybody could be an author. We had a rush of clients, and because of that, I threw bodies, I threw employees at the problem. Unfortunately, I hired unskilled people, and I needed to be more conscientious about the help that I brought in and also about the market. We were basically saying yes to any author who wanted to work with us, as opposed to looking closely at our ability to position them in the media and their expertise and their brand. We took on anybody and everybody. Obviously now, with The Mom Entrepreneur, I'm very focused. It's a very specific niche, and had I known that when Bisson Barcelona was growing, the results would have been very different.

What is your best advice for new entrepreneurs?

Stay the course. You can go down that path, you can get discouraged, you can empty your investment account and have your credit cards charged to the max, and think that you're never going to see the light of day again. It's really a faith in yourself and a belief that you can do this. If you don't have that, don't become an entrepreneur, because it is extremely challenging. You will be tested to the limit. You really have to stay the course. Don't let the bumps in the road deter you.


donna santosof DonnaSantos.com

In this interview, I spoke with Donna Santos, a Toronto-based photographer who helps entrepreneurs and small business owners authentically portray their passion through photography, while helping them to accomplish their strategic marketing objectives.


I am what you can call a people photographer. I use the creative medium of photography to help

entrepreneurs portray their passions through portraits and headshots. I have expanded also to fulfill some of the photo requirements that most small businesses need, like for websites, catalogs, product shots, lifestyle shots.

My background is in television, and I've mostly done production management in the industry, and alongside that, I'd been doing photography on the side. In 2008, an opportunity came. The television industry was so slow, and it was a good time for me to pursue photography full time.


I guess I'll start with the strengths. When I was thinking about going into photography full time, I had a business and life coach that I started with, and I think she has helped me a lot in establishing the core foundations and core values of me as a business person, and I think that is a very important thing to have before you even venture out, because your core values will never change.

I think one of the most common struggles that I have is being overwhelmed, doing creative things and at the same time trying to run my business. There are so many things to take care of, and my to-do list


http://www.donnasantos.com/

has been expanding. One of my weaknesses is not knowing what to do when I'm overwhelmed with information or things to do. I kind of get paralyzed.

How are you overcoming that?

One of the best things that I've done for myself is hire a virtual assistant. Just to have a project off of your head and freeing up space in your mind is such a great thing, knowing someone else is taking care of it as you do other things. That's one of the things I have found very helpful, and also I think time blocking is a good thing. I schedule my day in blocks of time.


If I would have only known how fulfilling an entrepreneur's life is, I would have done it sooner.

What is your best advice for new entrepreneurs?

There's a lot of help and resources available to you. It's just a matter of a phone call or asking for help. There are a lot of freelancers out there that you don't have to hire full time that can probably do the job for you better than you can. There are experts that you can hire on a project basis and learn from. You don't have to do it all on your own.

Also, be sure what you want to do before you let go of your full time job. Knowing exactly what you want is a big factor. If you're still testing the waters, I think you can do that while you still have a job. Assess yourself carefully.

I think it helps to have an actionable and realistic business plan in place and a follow-through attitude. I'm guilty of this. I like doing business plans, but sometimes, I just put it in my file, and it just sits there. Put it where you can actually see it. Have a regular time to flip through it and see where you're at in your business and rejig your plan, if things have changed. Your business plan is there for a purpose. It's not there to be kept in your filing cabinet.

And, if you need business advice, turn first to your industry experts. They will know your industry, your market, competition, the trends in your



industry. I think it will save you a lot of time and money if you go straight to the industry experts.

The last advice I could give is, keep the passion for your craft alive. Make sure that the struggles in your business doesn't ruin the romance between you and your passion. I think it's really important to keep the fire in there. If you have that passion, it's what other people are going to see in you.


jaime almondof JaimeAlmond.com

In this interview, I spoke with Jaime Almond, an Internet marketing strategist who helps businesses develop an online presence that builds credibility and trust with their target audiences and convert more prospects to customers.


I help businesses create online marketing strategies, and I do that with coaching and workshops. Right now, I'm finding that a lot of businesses are really interested in Twitter, and I finding that people don't

really know how to use it, so basically I work with a business based on what their goals are and finding a way to communicate with their market through the Internet.

For a few years, it's been something that I wanted to do, and I was contracting in high-tech, both in Canada and in Australia, and then I was fortunate enough to be accepted into a program that the Canadian government runs, which supports entrepreneurs in their first year to get started financially and to write a business plan and that type of thing.

Let's talk about strengths and weaknesses. What are things that you struggle with?

Time management is probably my weakness. It's easy to have a tendency to work on what's fun rather than what's urgent or what's important, and I think sometimes I find myself working on long-term projects rather than short-term, cash-generating activities. There has to be a balance, of course, but finding the discipline within myself to actually work on what is important, what needs to be done, rather than what's fun. I'm just trying to be really conscious of how I spend my time and what the best activities for my time are.

It's that shift from the mentality of being an employee, where someone


http://www.jaimealmond.com/

sets the time you work, and they tell you how much you get paid. As an entrepreneur, you have more flexibility so that can be a double-edge sword.

What do you think you're getting right so far as an entrepreneur?

I'm very systematic. My background is IT. I'm a strategist. I'm pretty good at setting up systems. I do create systems that work, and I find that if I'm struggling with something, then I identify that that's actually somewhere where I need to get help.


I wish I had known that I didn't have to know everything. Because my industry is IT, especially with the Internet, it's just changing all the time. There's just so much information out there, and coming into it, I felt like I needed to know everything. I wasted a lot of time and money trying to learn everything, and in the end, I realized that it's really not necessary, because each circumstance and each business requires its own strategy. It's different for every situation, so even if I go and learn, it's not necessarily going to be applied. It's better to do it as I need it rather than trying to do everything up front. That came with not feeling confident in what I was offering and who I was going to offer it to, and as my confidence grew, I realized that it's not really the knowledge, knowing everything.

And, I think there's something really important to say about understanding what you're offering and being really clear on it and the benefits that you offer to people, because when that's really clear, it becomes much easier to sell.

Another important lesson is learning to talk about money with people. It can be really scary at first. When someone understands what you offer and why you charge what you charge, then money doesn't have to be an object.

What is your most important lesson or best advice for new entrepreneurs?

For me, it's believing in myself and trusting, trusting that by doing what I'm good at and what I'm passionate about, it works out, rather than focusing on not making money or getting the client. Really believing in ourselves


and having an understanding of our worth, I think that that's really important.

And, I actually think it's really important to, if not have the whole weekend off, at least have one full day off a week where you can completely regroup. You can't be strategic when you never get out of it, and I find that I actually can't physically work seven days a week. It doesn't work for me. The more I work, the less strategic I get, and it goes back to making mistakes and being stressed. For myself, it's actually imperative that I have time for my self-care every day and take time off on the weekend.


jen spencerof Jen Spencer Coaches

In this interview, I caught up with Jen Spencer of Jen Spencer Coaches, a coaching firm specializing in working with individuals and companies who earn their livelihood through the expression of creative thought (the "creative class").

We started by talking a bit about balancing the creative side of business with actually getting work done.

Entrepreneurs, in general, are pretty creative people. I look at business as a really great medium for creativity, but it's not one that's always recognized as such. I think there's a passion in a project, to make sure it's exactly how your vision is, and then there's this other part that I have just recognized that's systems and getting stuff done so that you can, in fact, reach where you want to reach. They're not mutually exclusive, but as an entrepreneur, figuring out what you're willing to let go of is definitely a process.

I don't think that I can do my business without other people. I've come to the realization that I cannot grow my business without the help of others. It takes a while to get there. You often don't know what you don't know. Even if someone gave you a handbook, I think entrepreneurs are pretty independent. They really like to do it their own way. It takes you a while to figure out what you need.

What is your main job as an entrepreneur?

I think anybody's job as an entrepreneur is to be of value and be a resource.

What do you think of the idea of balance?

I think of balance as a state of mind. I don't think it's some destination that we hit. There are days you're present. There are days when you're less


http://www.jenspencercoaches.com/

present. The balance, to me, is really being present where you are. You're not thinking about what you have to do or what you need to do. You're just experiencing what's in front of you in a way that is peaceful. There's ease. There's engagement.

Another thing I think is really valuable as an entrepreneur is giving your time to the community, whatever community really excites you or that you're inspired by.

I like the way that you put that. You give your time to a community, not the community around you, which I think is an important distinction. It's important to give back, and I think anyone who does allows people to see who they really are and what they represent. I think that's key, which community do you give your time to, who do you give your time to. Who are the people that you want to serve? When you figure out who that is and why you want to serve them, you're really motivated by that group of people, and it makes you want to do your best work.

There's something on your website that I think is interesting, "We're booked, but we'd love to talk with you about it January." It's always a struggle that you've got to pay the bills, but what I have found is, once you're selective and really clear about what you want your capacity to be, the right kind of clients show up. You have to have discipline to be able to say no to what's not right for you. Saying no is actually saying yes to what you really want.

And that's actually one of the toughest jobs for an entrepreneur, saying no.

It's a lot of habitual thinking. A country road, if it gets driven on enough, will get paved, and eventually you can have a ten-lane highway. A ten-lane highway is really difficult to remove, but it's really easy to create a new country road that's a better route. We've got these habits, these ways of thinking that save us time, but your brain doesn't know what to make a ten-lane highway. It only makes a ten-lane highway out of what gets driven on the most.


Something I recognize for myself is that when I stress out about my


business or the money that's coming in or being able to meet my goals, it's amazing how much that cuts off what comes to me. I don't have any other way to describe it other than when I have faith, faith in my higher self, and that means different things for different people, but when I have faith in my abilities, and I just trust, and I still do everything I need to do, money flies into my office like I've never seen.

I also think you really just have to be patient. I have really learned a lot in the past two years about being patient and understanding that I'm building something. It's not this quick fix.

At the end of the day, it's about the work you provide and being confident in your ability to be able to create what you want and making sure you have people around you who support you. Always ask for help.


regina perataof Restoring Power

In this interview, I spoke with Regina Perata. Regina helps creatives, entrepreneurs, leaders, and partners restore their power and get what they want. Her new site goes live December 16th, so be sure to check it out then, www.restoringpower.com.

Restoring Power is Regina's second business, she has been a solopreneur since January 2002. To learn more about Regina immediately, you can find her on Twitter.

Tell me a bit about your business.

I help creatives, entrepreneurs, leaders, partners restore their power and get what they want. I work in one-on-one sessions and group sessions and seminars, both publicly and virtually. When I say power, I mean to locate my source, so it's more about empowerment - freedom, self-expression, living fully.

My belief is two sort of bold assertions in the world. One is, all our suffering and all our breakdown can be traced back to a loss of power within ourselves. In other words, we have shifted our power from us to somewhere outside of us - the circumstance, the economy, that person, this boss, my ex-husband, whatever it is. We put the power out there and not in us, and we have a breakdown, or we have suffering. My assertion is, when we restore our power, we no longer have suffering, and we live fully, regardless of any circumstance.

My second bold assertion is that, as human beings, we're made up of beauty and light and love and goodness, and we also have a dark side. Sides of us that are nasty and mean, things that we're embarrassed of or ashamed of or that are taboo to talk about, thoughts that we have that we're not proud of. In this culture, typically what we do with those things is we just shove them off to the side and back in the corner. We don't bring them up to the surface. We don't say them out loud, and that old adage,


http://twitter.com/reginaperata

http://www.restoringpower.com/

what resists persists shows up, so these things leak out in our life, but more importantly than that, I believe, if we have them shoved off in the corner and we're only being with our light side, if you will, and certainly only presenting that, then we're not presenting ourselves as a whole human being. One of my methodologies is to work with that dark side and make a safe, powerful space for people to really explore that and look their dark side in the eye. When they do that and when you have on one hand the light and on the other hand the dark, now I have wholeness. I've seen this over and over, where people have massive transformations and massive breakthroughs, simply by making peace with their dark side.

How did you get your start?

I launched my business from scratch. I didn't know one person here, and I noticed that there weren't a lot of women's networking organizations, and I had just come from the Bay Area, where there was massive networking. There wasn't a whole lot of that in Portland, so I got myself on the advisory board of Portland Female Executives and helped to grow that organization, but what really made the difference was, I saw all these really interesting women and how they were hungry to have conversations with each other about being entrepreneurs and being women in business, and so I formed salons basically, where I had a 15-woman limit. They had to be invited by somebody who had been before, and I had them in my home once a month, and I served wine and cheese. They showed up at six o'clock, and we talked until around seven. Then I would have a new topic each month. I would talk about ten or fifteen minutes on a topic and then I would open up and have questions. I just chose a topic and sent out invitations, and the thing just filled up like wildfire. I had no idea I was striking gold when I first had the idea. I had women on waiting lists for two years. It did a couple of things. One, it provided a service, but it also built my business. People had an opportunity to learn what it was like to work with me, and many of those women hired me themselves, but many of them brought me back into their companies. That was the secret sauce. I had no idea. The first year, my business made only $13,000. There was a recession in Portland, and I knew no one. The second year, I was over $50,000. By the third year, I was at $90,000, and by the fourth year, I was in six figures.



http://portlandfemaleexecutives.com/

I really struggle with prudence, crossing my T's, dotting my I's, making sure my invoicing is done in time, filing. That's an area where I need support, definitely. My solution to that has been to hire help.

I also work pretty intensely. It's tricky, because I don't really believe in this thing about balance. You can't have it all, but you can have things at different times. There was a time that I was working so much that my relationships were suffering, and I didn't know how to manage that. I'm much better now, but I think it's still easy for me to spend sixteen hours a day working, just because I'm totally obsessed and into it.

Strengths, discipline. I was a nationally competitive swimmer and a nationally competitive fiddle player. The level of discipline I had in my life - practicing two hours for swimming, practicing two hours on the fiddle, and then going back and practicing two hours of swimming that night - I had no idea that level of discipline would help me today. I wake up, and I come down to my office and go to work, just like someone would who worked for a firm, and I think that serves me greatly working for myself.

I also don't just network. I build relationships authentically. I love people. I love meeting people. I love being a contribution.

Another thing I'm grateful I'm good at is asking for help and learning. I'm a consummate learner, and I am not afraid to ask for help. There's always someone better than me, smarter than me, thank goodness.

What's something you wish you would have known earlier on?

I wish I would have just had the courage to just be me. I have no regrets, but it's taken me until now to really feel like I can be myself and still be successful in business.

I also was afraid to say how much I really wanted to be a contribution. I knew as a young child that I was born to make a difference with people. I knew that very early on, but I was afraid to say that because I felt like it was cheesy, and I felt like, "Well, doesn't everybody? Isn't that what everybody says?," and I certainly didn't want to be like everybody. I wanted to be different. I wish now, in hindsight, or to answer your question, what do I wish I would have done earlier on is just to tell the truth


about all of that.


Be authentic, and be courageous. Go for it.

Important Note About Regina: Restoring Power is due to go live December 16th, with a formal launch January 1st. You can power up at www.restoringpower.com. To learn more about her immediately, visit her on Twitter.




http://www.restoringpower.com/

maggie millerof DiscoverHope Fund

In this interview, I spoke with Maggie Miller, founder of the DiscoverHope Fund, an international development organization promoting abundance for women and their families living in economic poverty through micro-credit and sustainable support systems.

Tell me a bit about your organization and how you got your start.

We're an international development non-profit, and our primary goal is to help promote abundance for women and their families who are living in economic poverty. We do that through micro-credit and sustainable support systems. Really, that means two goals. We give micro-loans for macro-dreams. We give small loans that average about $100 a loan to help women initiate micro-businesses or small businesses. We follow that up by cultivating their passions and talents and asking them what they want and need to maximize their goals professionally, financially, personally. What that looks like and has looked like so far is literacy classes, health education, community health education, artisan education, culinary education, business education, all based on what women have asked for.

How I got my start as an entrepreneur and the start of Discover Hope was kind of path unfolding. I lived and worked in San Diego in non-profit for six years, before I ever was in South America creating Discover Hope or the idea of Discover Hope. In my non-profit work there, I was tasked with a charge to create a 16-week peace education program for kids who were in gang activities in San Diego, and I suddenly realized, I didn't know the first thing about being in that situation, and here I was supposed to the author of their information. That was the first time I really realized that you really need to ask people what they want and need, and it was a great lesson that transpired and is now a part of everything that I do.

One day I was working, loved everything I was doing, loved San Diego, and this still small voice and said, "You need to see with other eyes." It was actually half Spanish. It said, "You need to see con otros ojos," which


http://www.lendhope.org/

means with other eyes, and I proceeded to ignore the voice, because I was comfortable in every way, shape, and form and didn't really want to take on what that might have meant, but it kept coming back to me in my meditations, my thought process, my prayer process. It wouldn't go away, and so I started reflecting on what it meant to see with other eyes. After about three months of reflection, I realized that that meant that I needed to step outside the boundaries of the United States of America for me, personally, to see myself from another perspective and as a change agent in this world.

I had a great mentor and friend who was a venture capitalist and entrepreneur working internationally, and this mentor was like, "Why don't you come to the mountains of Peru for a few weeks?" I told him, because of the reflection I had done, "No, I'm just going there." When I uttered those words, that was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. All of a sudden, I was giving my eight-month notice. I sold everything I had. I paid off everything that I owed, and I started absolutely at zero. I was quite frightened, because all of a sudden, I felt myself on the edge of a precipice and the universe in front of me, and all I could really do was trust at that point.

I got on the plane March 3, 2004, and he dropped me in the northern Andes, where nobody has blond hair, and nobody has blue eyes, which is both of what I have and look like, and I started my journey of knowing people from a different perspective. People were so gracious to me, and I spent about four months there as an ethnographer, studying culture by participation in it and asking women, "What do you want? What do you need?" I was talking to them in the markets and in the fields and in their kitchens over 500 cups of Nescafé coffee, and they all said the same thing. They wanted a hand up, not a hand out, and they wanted a window of opportunity for themselves to use their own personal power to step through and create their own businesses and sustainability for their families. Therein, I started studying micro-credit models and initiated Hope Bank, which was my two-year micro-credit pilot project that eventually became Discover Hope.

That's an inspiring journey, and I was thinking of a couple of words you said in there, and one of them was trust. You just had to trust what was in front of you. I think there comes a point when you just have to know intuitively what's inside you and just go with that, and if you do, a lot of


times that leads to bigger things than you could have ever imagined.

When you have that small voice or that idea or that dream planted inside of you, no matter what it is, that doesn't go away. It just proceeds to grow and cultivate inside of you, and I think a lot of people, that's where their discontent actually comes from, is that they just keep pushing it down. The alternative is to look at it, and when you look at it, it means action and change, and fear comes up. I think it's just too much for people to think about sometimes, or circumstances of their life also don't allow them to, or they perceive don't allow them to, look at it.

Most entrepreneurs take that leap of faith and just trust it. Some people might call them risk-takers, but I think the risk comes in the not doing.

Right.

Let's talk a bit about strengths and weaknesses. What are some of the things that you're getting right as an entrepreneur, and what do you struggle with?

Weaknesses and struggles, I'd say my biggest weakness as a leader and entrepreneur has to do with control and letting go of control. When you birth this idea, you have ideas about what it should look like, how it should act, much like having a little child. After a while, your child has its own personality and starts doing what it wants to do and making its own decisions, and so as the organization has grown, you grow the body of people you consult with around you, the board of directors, the volunteers. They all have their own personalities, and they all have their own ways of getting things done. I've found the hardest thing for me is letting go of every detail, because I am a detail person, getting back up to vision level and not getting caught in the weeds, the everyday details.

I think that a good leader inspires people to really bring to life their passion, and I really do think that that's my strength. I am a facilitator of letting people build their dreams. Inspiring passion is definitely my strength, and it's also the one thing that I think I've done right. Every single person that comes to Discover Hope, the first thing I ask them is, "What do you really love?" I don't really ask people, "What do you do, and how can I fit that with Discover Hope?" I say, "What do you really love, and what are the experiences that you really love, where you just feel alive?"


Everyone is just absolutely passionate, because they love what they're doing, because that's what they chose to do.

You also do that with the women that your organization helps. You encourage them to find their passion. How do you see that impacting them going forward, if they are able to connect with that?

I think it puts people in touch with their own personal power. I don't use the word "empowerment" in my mission statement or in the verbiage of my organization for one reason. I just think it's like, a person gives power to another person, and therefore, they're better off. I don't see things happening that way. I know it's just rhetoric, but I always say, "We open a door of opportunity." Whenever you open a door of opportunity for someone, like this precipice we're talking about, when a woman takes a micro-credit loan of $100, that is a decision that she has to make, to walk through this door of opportunity. That comes with responsibility and ownership. They have the opportunity to ignite their own personal power. When someone ignites their own power, their life changes.

I like that thought that someone else can't give it to you. It's within yourself, and when you unlock that, you're able to help and inspire so many more people around you.

Right. The president of my board said to me, "Your job is just to be who you are and hold that space." When you are that, people get it. It's like a magnet to them. The whole sentence, "Be the change you wish to see in the world," seems like this out there concept, but it's absolutely possible and doable, and it's right in front of us. The way that we do that is we wake up every day, and we give our greatest passion and strength to the world moment by moment, and if you really do that, it's magnetic. People see it in you, and they want to do everything they can to help you, because it's just exciting, and then after they do that for a while, they say, "This is really possible for me. I want this for myself, too." They start waking up and giving their greatest strengths to the world moment by moment, and they start affecting people the same way you affected them. In that way, if you think about how that all plays out, there is change.

How about things you wish you would have known earlier on?


The entrepreneurial journey isn't always sexy. That's literally the first thing that came to my mind. I didn't see all the pieces of that journey ahead of me and all the learning that I would have to go through. The responsibility around it is great, great as in large. It is a hard path, but what comes from it is a life growth that is unmeasurable.

I wish I would have known to build a team that fills your gaps. That's been one of the most important ways I've overcome obstacles and that feeling of not knowing.

What's your best advice for entrepreneurs?

Ask for help. You have to ask people to help you and allow people to do what they love. Along the way, focus on building networks. You'll find help within those networks.


amber singleton riviereof Upstart Smart

I thought I'd wrap the series by sharing my own responses to the questions I asked each of them. I hope that our collective experiences and advice will help you somehow. A one-degree turn might be all it takes to change the course of a business, and within this series, I think you'll find many nuggets of valuable insight that might help you make that turn. I know I have.

What's my business?

I definitely think I'm a serial entrepreneur. I always have more than one project going on at any given point and usually a couple coming down the pike. I recently stopped trying to cubbyhole myself with a title (the only one that fits, really, is entrepreneur, but I can't get used to it). Instead, I just talk in terms of projects, and I currently have two that are humming along.

First, I have Upstart Smart, which is essentially a resource for entrepreneurs and small business owners. In a nutshell, I've worked hard for many years to try to establish financial independence through my business. I believe entrepreneurship is a path to self-reliance. I don't want to live paycheck to paycheck. I want to survive on my own. More importantly, I want to thrive. Entrepreneurship, I believe, can help you create your own destiny. You can do something you love, something that completely lights you up and that you can talk about until the end of time (boring your family and friends to the point of gouging their eyes out or sticking pencils in their ears), and if you do it right, you can earn a substantial living and have a lot of flexibility over your life. The trick is in doing it right. I've had to learn a lot of things the hard way, through trial and error, through mistakes. I hope that Upstart Smart will help me and other entrepreneurs through our shared experiences. If it will save us a painful or expensive step here or there, then it's done its job.

Second, I have Brown Bug Project (I think soon to be Give Back Project, stay tuned), which provides web design and marketing services to the entrepreneurial, solo entrepreneurial, mom-and-pop, work-at-home, small


http://www.ambersingleton.com/

http://www.brownbugproject.com/

http://www.upstartsmart.com/



business crowd. Basically, it was started as a way to offer websites that looked good, were a true representation of the people they represented, were easy to maintain, didn't cost what a car costs, and were simple, clean, and easy to navigate.

That's my business...in a nutshell...right now.

How did I get my start as an entrepreneur?

I think I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, although it took me a while to put a name on it. I can remember at probably 10-years-old "playing store" with one of my sisters. We made up names for ourselves, of course, and I was always Jessie Montgomery. I thought it had a powerful ring to it. I'm sure we would dress up in our "business suits," and I distinctly remember using the JCPenney catalog as some important business document that I had on my makeshift desk. I had these images of powerhouse women, specifically J.C. Wiatt in Baby Boom. This story makes me laugh now. My opinions and perceptions of business have changed tremendously, and I'm certainly no powerhouse woman bossing the men around. The self-reliance thing, though, that strength and independence for women, is still just as important to me. I think about my grandmothers. My maternal grandmother, who just had her seventieth birthday this year, was a farmer and ran right alongside the men her entire life. My paternal grandmother, who died several years ago, was a manager at Bill's Dollar Store and a preacher's wife, and I thought that was powerful, too. I saw these women, whether on TV or in my own life, running the show, and that's what I wanted to do.

What's my weakness?

I take on too much, burn myself out, and then take on too little as a result. I have a tendency to over-obligate myself, more so to my own demands than that of my clients, to the point that I end up physically exhausted, whether by over-doing it or by becoming so wired up and restless that I can't sleep or turn off my brain. I have to be very intentional about not over-extending myself, because when I do, I end up on a roller coaster of feast and famine. I want to do it all, and I want to do it all right now. I don't think it's about impatience or believing that I'm super-human and can do it all. It's just that I'm so excited by opportunities that I can't wait to get started.


What's my strength?

I can get things done. I can find all the moving parts that have to be built within a project, prioritize them or arrange them in the most efficient and effective order, break down each part into a series of steps, jump in, and get the entire thing built very quickly. I remember that I used to amaze my accountability partner with my ability to build websites, marketing plans, or whatever needed to be built fast enough to make someone's head spin. I think she's gotten used to it. It's not impressive anymore. It's a fun craft, though, and I've used it over and over in my ventures as an entrepreneur, and it's very handy when building websites. I definitely believe in the motto: Talk today, done tomorrow. That, of course, only feeds my weakness.

What am I getting right?

I'm finally figuring out to keep things simple. I used to think that the more complicated plan would be the one that worked. Nothing could be further from the truth. Simplicity is required in everything - your to-do list, your focus, the actions you take on a daily basis within your business, your website, everything. The 80/20 Principle is true. Cut the fat.

What do I struggle with?

Two things.

Number one, the revenue line. Where is it, dang it? Julie Morgenstern wrote about it. I find it to be elusive. She said, "Everything you spend your time on should be assessed in terms of its proximity to the revenue line, the point at which your company is actually making or saving money." She says you need to dance close to it and that "the largest portion of your time should be spent on tasks that are, at most, one or two steps" away from it. I think that's a very specific set of activities. It's some mix of marketing and promotion. Finding the right mix and then staying there, doing those same tasks over and over with blind faith, that's the tricky part. As I've mentioned in other writings, I don't know that magic formula just yet, but I dance as close to it as possible, and I get a little closer with every new lead and every new client.



http://www.marriedwithluggage.com/

Number two, balance, but don't we all?

What do I wish I would have known earlier on?

That it's about getting closer and closer to the truest and best version of yourself, that you won't get that right immediately out of the gate, that every mistake gets you closer to it, that when you feel your heart fluttering with excitement you're close, and that sometimes you have to be the uglier version of yourself to figure out that that's not who you want to be. Your business is a representation of that. Find yourself, be yourself, find success.

What's my most important lesson so far as a entrepreneur?

It's about movement, imua (moving forward with strong momentum). Just start. You'll gain momentum and overcome inertia. Fall and get up. It's in the doing. Don't get too caught up in mistakes and minutia. Keep moving.

What's my best advice for new entrepreneurs?

Get down to finding customers and clients early. Make that what it's all about, finding them and becoming an invaluable asset to them.


thank youfor Sharing in the Journey

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the stories within this e-book. More importantly, I hope you’ve learned several ways to improve your business.

Please accept my apologies (contributors, this goes for you as well) for any typos or other mishaps that might have made their way into this e-book. It’s five o’clock in the morning, and I’m wrapping up yet another long (very long) day trying to get this ready to go. It’s been a lot of work, no doubt. I’ve poured close to 100 hours into this project, but it’s been worth every minute of it. I hope you agree.

Thanks again for sharing in the journey!

Best of luck on yours,Amber

P.S.I’d love to hear your feedback about the e-book. You can reach me by email or on Twitter.


http://twitter.com/AmberSR

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

more infoon Upstart Smart

Upstart Smart helps you grow your small business and learn how to be a successful entrepreneur by sharing in the experiences of others. There are three "moving parts" of the Upstart Smart site - the magazine, the podcast, and the game.

Play the Game!

Ready to improve your business, network with other entrepreneurs, and have a little fun while you're at it? The Upstart Smart Game is a fast-paced program designed to help you learn more about the different aspects of being a solo entrepreneur, while showing you ways to achieve balance and create a business and lifestyle by design rather than default.

We’re now registering players for the January 2010 game. There are limited spaces available, so reserve yours now.

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This design isA Brown Bug Project

(and the first ever Give Back Project)


http://www.brownbugproject.com/

Documents

One Entrepreneur's Journeyauthenticvisibility.com/pdfs/OneEntrepreneursJourney.pdf · Being an entrepreneur is a challenge. Enter at your own risk. The advice offered in this e-book