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by Andrea N. Browne, John Miley, Susannah Snider and Michael Stratford
From Oprah Winfrey to Steve Jobs to J.K. Rowling, entrepreneurial success stories are the stuff from which American dreams are made. Much like these famous names, the six self-made millionaires we’re profiling have one thing in common: Thanks to hard work, determination and sound advice from mentors, friends and family, they’ve been able to build thriving businesses from the ground up.
The rise to the top can be bumpy. In fact, some of the entrepreneurs we talked to were homeless during the early years of their companies. That’s why they all agree that it’s important to help others in need. All, including Radio One’s Catherine L. Hughes and Life is good co-founder Bert Jacobs, give back to the community by volunteering time, donating to charitable organizations or running their own charities.
Learn how these six diverse entrepreneurs — from a t-shirt designer to a media mogul — turned meager beginnings into multimillion-dollar success and what advice they offer to budding business tycoons who hope to follow in their footsteps.
Catherine L. Hughes
Courtesy of Radio One
Age: 64
Occupation: Founder and chairperson, Radio One
Advice to young entrepreneurs: “Sometimes the ones who love you the most will give you the worst business advice.”
By conventional standards, Hughes wasn’t destined to build a successful multimillion-dollar media company. She was a teen mom by 16 and a high-school dropout. However, she later completed high school, followed by brief stints at area universities in her hometown of Omaha, Neb.
Despite her limited formal education, Hughes, who credits publishing legend John H. Johnson as one of her mentors, worked her way up at Omaha’s KOWH radio starting in 1969 before heading to the nation’s capital to become a lecturer at Howard University. In 1975, she became general manager for the university’s radio station, WHUR-FM. By 1979, she bought her first radio station, WOL-AM in D.C., with her then-husband and founded Radio One a year later.
Those early years were rough. Hughes, who was divorced by then, slept with her son on the floor of her radio station because she couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. “My mother tried her best to talk me out of the radio business because of that,” Hughes recalls. It’s for this reason that she advises young entrepreneurs to be wary about who they divulge their challenges to — even family. “If I had listened [to my mother], I would be a government employee right now and there would be no Radio One.”
Thirty-two years later, in addition to the radio company, Hughes’ empire includes her television network TV One and several interactive ventures, including NewsOne.com and HelloBeautiful.com. Her charitable efforts include serving as a board member and the main benefactor for the Piney Woods School, a boarding school located in Piney Woods, Miss., that serves students from financially strapped families.
Bert Jacobs
Courtesy of Life Is Good
Age: 46
Occupation: Co-Founder and CEO, Life is good
Advice to young entrepreneurs: “Try to shoot for a timeless business.”
You’ve probably seen the beret-wearing, smiling face of “Jake,” the Life is good logo, on the company’s tee shirts and products. Co-founders Bert Jacobs and his brother, John Jacobs, 43, started peddling their tee shirts on the streets of Boston — going door-to-door at college dorms and sleeping in their van to save money — in 1989. It would take nearly six years, however, before their shirts finally caught on with consumers, thanks to “Jake.”
The logo, which is infused with optimism, was created after a conversation about how the world was slammed with constant negativity. It became an instant hit. Now, the New England-based company has revenues in excess of $100 million, and each year more of it goes toward their charity, Life is good Kids Foundation, which helps children overcome life-threatening challenges.
“In the beginning, we made every business mistake in the book,” says Bert. The brothers didn’t have a business plan or growth strategy — a formula for disaster, if you go by what’s taught in business school. Bert credits part of their success to listening to their friends and customers as informal focus groups, rather than “experts.” He advises budding entrepreneurs to: “Try to shoot for a timeless business that will work through good times and bad.”
Ali Brown
Courtesy of Ali Brown
Age: 40
Occupation: Entrepreneur, business consultant and publisher,AliBrown.com
Advice to young entrepreneurs: “It’s important you seek out other business owners for information, advice, support and resources.”
Fed up with her dead-end job at a New York City ad agency, Brown decided to quit in 1998. Armed with her brother’s hand-me-down computer, she launched her first marketing agency, AKB Communications, from her kitchen table.
While having her own business was exciting, the uncertainty of self-employment had its challenges. Brown remembers all too well maxing out credit cards and draining her bank account to stay afloat in the early days. One night in particular, she tried to withdraw $20 from an ATM but was denied because her balance was only $18.56. Thirteen years later, thanks to her hard work and perseverance, Brown has achieved many successes: She earned her first million before the age of 35 and has appeared on ABC’s reality show “Secret Millionaire,” where she donated money to several organizations. She still actively supports three of them.
When it comes down to deciding if entrepreneurship is the right move for you, Brown says, “Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. Every definition of entrepreneur I’ve found includes the word ‘risk’.” For those who are willing to take the leap of faith, she advises: “It’s important that you seek out other business owners for information, advice, support and resources. Today, would-be entrepreneurs have the Internet and social media, and it’s a great place to get started learning more about how to grow a business.”
Jill Blashack Strahan
Courtesy of Jill Blashack Strahan
Age: 52
Occupation: Founder and CEO, Tastefully Simple
Advice to young entrepreneurs: “Having goals is absolutely critical.”
For Strahan, starting her multimillion-dollar company, Tastefully Simple, a direct sales retailer of specialty food products, began with “a dream and a shoestring.” She grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota and later started selling gourmet food baskets, which inspired her business.
In the beginning, the entrepreneur fed her fledgling company with $6,000 of her own savings and some loans from a friend and the Small Business Administration. Strahan’s first headquarters was a 1,200-square-foot space with a concrete floor and no running water. Early orders were packed on a pool table. Today, the Tastefully Simple offices take up nearly 200,000 square feet on a 79-acre lot.
In addition to running a company that’s valued at more than $100 million, Strahan finds time to give back to the community. Tastefully Simple has donated more than $5 million to local causes, and in 2009 teamed up with Share Our Strength, a group that seeks to end childhood hunger in America. If you’re an entrepreneur with a good idea, she says to remember that there isn’t an easy road to building a profitable business: “The secret to success doesn’t involve pixie dust or a magic bullet. Having goals is absolutely critical.”
Farrah Gray
Courtesy of Farrah Gray Publishing
Age: 27
Occupation: Founder and CEO, Farrah Gray Publishing
Advice to young entrepreneurs: “Keep your business small . . . niche yourself.”
When most 6-year-olds were worried about what time their favorite cartoon came on TV, Gray was already an entrepreneur. He was going door-to-door in his inner-city Chicago neighborhood selling hand-painted rocks as bookends to help his ailing mother make ends meet. “I can remember being very young and my mom having a heart attack. I wondered how we were going to pay the bills and thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to be poor like this anymore,'” he recalls.
Trying to figure out a way to improve his family’s home life sparked something big: By the time he was 17, Gray had founded and operated several businesses, including Kidztel, a prepaid phone card company, and Farr-Out Foods, a food company targeting young adults, which grossed $1.5 million in sales before he sold it. At 20, his first book, “Reallionaire: Nine Steps to Becoming Rich Inside and Out,” was published.
Now, Gray’s focused on his latest venture, Farrah Gray Publishing, a boutique celebrity book publishing house he started in 2009, which includes titles such as “Transparent” by CNN’s Don Lemon. Gray also spends his time contributing to charitable organizations, such as the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Marrow Donor Program. For anyone considering starting a new business, he suggests keeping things small: “A lot of times we get caught up in trying to be the next Facebook or Apple. That isn’t necessary — niche yourself.”
Jesse Conners
Courtesy of FirednFabulous/YouTube
Age: 28
Occupation: CEO and founder, PeppermintPark.com
Advice to young entrepreneurs: “There is constantly some fire that you have to put out . . . Don’t let it discourage you.”
Conners had an unusual childhood: When she was 9, her parents joined a cult and — believing that the world was about to end — sold all of their worldly possessions. From then until she was 18, Conners traveled across the U.S. and to Mexico with her family, following the cult’s message and searching for work along the way. As unconventional as it was, she says her upbringing spurred the independence she needed to succeed in business.
While in high school, she started doing the marketing for her father’s chiropractor practice, which eventually led to a job in real estate. At 21, she auditioned for and was cast in the first season of NBC’s “The Apprentice.” Although Conners didn’t win, her stint on national television landed her a job on the real estate speaking circuit. In 2008, she began building PeppermintPark.com, a membership-based fashion and luxury brand online retailer. The Web site has been up and running for a little over a year and has a ten-person staff.
Earlier this year, Conners’s “outside the box” approach to business helped her to surpass a $1 million net worth. In addition to running her company, she has offered charitable support to Elephant Human Relations Aid and provides resources to women who are victims of domestic abuse, according to her Web site. Conners advises budding entrepreneurs to be aware that daily obstacles are the norm, not the exception. “There is constantly some fire that you have to put out. That’s what running a business is all about,” Conners says. “Don’t let it discourage you. Try again, start again.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-your-future/6-rags-riches-millionaires-174215314.html
Entrepreneurship: Nothing to Lose and Everything to Gain
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by Dan Schawbel, contributor
I recently caught up with Ryan Blair, who is a serial entrepreneur and author of the new book “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain.” Ryan established his first company, 24-7 Tech when he was only twenty-one years old. Since then, he has created and actively invested in multiple start-ups and has become a self-made multimillionaire. After he sold his company ViSalus Sciences to Blyth in early 2008, the global recession took the company to the brink of failure resulting in a complete write off of the stock and near bankruptcy. Ryan as CEO went “all in” betting his last million dollars on its potential and turned the company around from the edge of failure to more than $150,000,000 a year in revenue in only 16 months winning the coveted DSN Global Turn Around Award in 2010. In this interview, Ryan talks about how he re-branded himself after being in a gang, the issues with the education system, and more.
How did you shake your criminal record and re-brand yourself?
I remember when I was working my way up in the first company that employed me, I used to have nightmares that one day they’d find out about that I had been in a gang, call me into the office, and fire me. In the beginning I didn’t talk much about what I’d been through. But eventually when I got to a point where I had established myself as a professional entrepreneur, I embraced my past, used it as part of my branding, and crossed over.
Ryan Blair
In this day and age people want authenticity. Now that the world is social, people know all about you. Assuming you decided to join humanity, that is. It turned out that as I started showing my true identity, so did the rest of the world. One of the reasons my company ViSalus is one of the fastest growing companies in the industry today is because we share our good, bad, and ugly. Like sharing a video of me playing a practical joke on one of my employees, for instance. As a result of embracing authenticity, I turned the company around from near bankruptcy to over $15 million a month today. Unlike our competitors, our distributors and customers know exactly who we are, and I’d say that corporate America has a lot of catching up to do.
What’s your take on the educational system? Will a college degree help or hurt your chances at starting a successful business?
As a product of Los Angeles’s public school system, in a state with the highest dropout rate in the nation (about 20 percent), I can tell you from personal experience that some of our brightest minds are being misidentified because of a one-size-fits-all learning environment. Because I had ADD and dyslexia I never got past the 9th grade.
I recall sitting with a career counselor in continuation high school, being told that I didn’t have the intellect or aptitude to become a doctor or a lawyer. They suggested a trade school, construction, something where I’d be working with my hands.
The irony is that today I employ plenty of doctors and lawyers. Would you rather be a doctor or a lawyer, or a guy who writes a check to doctors and lawyers?
If President Obama phoned me today and told me he was appointing me Educational Czar, I’d turn education into a business, a capitalistic, revenue driven system, creating a competitive environment where each school is trying to attract customers, based on quality of customer experience.
As an entrepreneur, having a college degree or getting classroom training won’t hurt your chances for starting a successful business, but it’s ultimately not necessary. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers,” he makes a point that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to master a skill set at a professional level. That means experience, over traditional education.
What three business lessons did you learn from juvenile detention?
I learned a lot about business and life from my time spent incarcerated. I like to call these pieces of wisdom my Philosophies from the Jail Cell to the Boardroom. One of the biggest lessons I learned was that in Juvenile Hall, new guys always get tested. When I went in the first time, I was just a skinny little white kid and I had to learn fast. People will be bumping into you on the basketball court, or asking you for things, testing to see if you’re tough.
And everyone knew that if a guy let someone take their milk during lunchtime, they weren’t as tough as they looked. Soon you’d be taking their milk everyday, and so would everyone else. It’s the same for business, if you give people the impression that you can be taken, you will be.
Also, adaptation is the key to survival. In jail the guy who rises to power isn’t always the strongest or the smartest. As prisoners come and go, he’s the one that adapts to the changing environment, while influencing the right people. You can use this in business, staying abreast of market trends, changing your game plan as technology shifts, and adapting our strategy around your company’s strongest competitive advantages. Darwin was absolutely right — survival is a matter of how you respond to change.
The last lesson I got from jail is that you have to learn how to read people. You don’t know who to trust. It’s the same for business because a lot of people come into my office with a front. I have to figure out quickly who is the real deal and who isn’t. Based on that fact, I developed an HR system that I use when interviewing potential new hires that I call the Connect Four Technique. Yep, you guessed it. I make my future employees — and I have hundreds of them — play me in Connect Four.
Can everyone be an entrepreneur? Can it be learned or do you have to be born with a special gene?
No. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur. There are two types of people in the world, domesticated and undomesticated. Some people are so domesticated through their social programming and belief system, so employee minded, that they could never be entrepreneurs. And they shouldn’t even bother trying. The irony is that this is coming from a guy who teaches millions of people how to become entrepreneurs. I’m literally selling a book about becoming an entrepreneur, telling you that not everyone should read it.
To be an entrepreneur, you have to have fighting instincts. Are instincts genetic? I don’t think so, but you ‘inherit’ them from your upbringing. Now, if you’re smart you can reprogram your beliefs. But there are still some people that would rather watch other people be entrepreneurs, like the people in the Forbes “richest celebrity list” than take the time to reprogram themselves, and live their lives like rock stars, too.
Is there a need for business plans these days?
When you’ve really got the entrepreneurial bug, the last thing you want to do is sit down and write a business plan. It’s the equivalent of writing a book about playing the guitar before actually knowing how to play the guitar. You don’t know what your new business is going to be like. And just like a guitar, a business will have to be tweaked and tuned multiple times, and you’ll need long practice sessions and repetition, before you can get even one successful song out of it.
In my book “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain,” I actually included a chapter called “I Hate Business Plans” where I talk about this. Most business plans that get sent to me, I close within seconds of opening them up because they are full of fluff and hype. A business plan should be simple, something you could scribble on a scratch pad. No more than three pages of your business objectives, expected results, and the strategy to get there. But the best business plan is one built from a business that is already up and running and that matches the business’s actual results.
The point is that you should be so obsessed with your business that you can’t sleep at night because that’s all you can think about. And that’s your ultimate “business plan.”
Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, LLC, a full-service personal branding agency, and author of “Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-your-future/entrepreneurship-nothing-lose-everything-gain-183145165.html
Mastering the New Freelance Economy
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by Kimberly Palmer
Tara Gentile was working in what she calls a “dead-end retail job” at Borders, earning $28,000 a year as a store manager, when she decided she’d be better off launching her own business as anentrepreneur coach. Aside from more money, she also wanted the freedom to spend more time at home with her daughter, who was then six months old. Now, just over a year and a half later, Gentile, 28, works mostly from her home office in Reading, Pa., earns about $150,000 a year, and spends much of her time teaching other people how they can do the same.
Gentile is part of a new wave of people opting to work themselves, driven by both economic necessity as well as a desire to take more control of their income. “The declining economy forces people to think more creatively about how they earn money, and in general, people are questioning the idea of job security more than ever before,” says Chris Guillebeau, author of “The Art of Non-Conformity.” Entrepreneurial activity is at a 15-year high, according to the nonprofit Kauffman Foundation, with growth strongest among 35- to 44-year-olds.
“It’s 100 percent the economy,” says Tory Johnson, a television journalist and small business owner, about what’s driving the interest in entrepreneurial activities. Johnson decided she wanted to grow multiple streams of income after getting laid off early in her career. “I understand the security that comes from knowing you are not reliant on a single source of income, or beholden to one person who can pull the plug,” she says. Shortly after her lay-off, Johnson launched Women for Hire, a career recruitment company, and most recently she started Spark and Hustle, a series of conferences for women building small businesses.
Here are nine strategies to help get your entrepreneurial idea off the ground:
Find your niche. “I normally coach people to think about what really turns you on. Maybe it’s something in your day job, even if you hate it, maybe there’s some element that you really love. Whatever those things are, those are the best things to build your business around because that is what will sustain you through the dips and failures that come with being an entrepreneur,” says Gentile.
Guillebeau recommends thinking about what people always ask your advice about, then considering if you could turn that into a consulting business. Then, he says, set up a blog describing what you do, create a Paypal account to receive funds, and you’re in business.
Know what motivates you (and it’s usually not money). Johnson urges people to think beyond cash flow to get at what drives them. “For me, it was to protect and insulate my family from ever having to experience that sheer pain from a pink slip,” she says. “For others, it might be to pay for medical treatment of a family member or someone’s illness,” she adds. Understanding motivation makes it easier to keep going during tough times, Johnson says.
Embrace the side hustle. Pamela Slim, author of “Escape from Cubicle Nation,” uses the term “side hustle” to refer to earning money through entrepreneurial activities in addition to one’s full-time job. Many people have significant financial obligations, she says, and simply can’t quit their jobs to pursue a small-business dream. Launching a side hustle not only allows them to pursue an idea with minimal risk, but also gives them a back-up plan if their full-time job suddenly disappears.
“People’s perception of the stability of corporate life is eroding, if not totally gone. People know it’s not smart to solely rely on corporate employment,” she says. And if they do hold onto their jobs, the side hustle provides an extra source of income. A recent survey by Elance, a website that connects freelancers with work, found that about 3 in 10 respondents hold down a full-time job while freelancing on the side.
Ramit Sethi, creator of IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com, says after surveying more than 100,000 people, he discovered the main reason people want to earn more money is to have the option of eventually quitting their job. Side benefits include using the new skills to negotiate a higher salary and having more spending money, he adds. He launched a program, Earn1k.com, to help people earn $1,000 per month or more. The course starts at $997, but he says he gives full refunds if participants don’t earn $1,000.
Protect your day job. Slim warns people against violating their employers’ policies that prohibit outside activity like blogging or selling products that could be in competition with the company’s products. In some cases, companies can claim ownership of any products employees create while employed full-time. “First, check for any non-compete agreements,” she says.
Take advantage of free technology. Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, and other forms of social media make it easy to build a brand and a business for little or no money. “It’s very easy and an almost negligible cost for anybody to put up a basic website where you can sell a product or service,” Slim says. In the past, she says, entrepreneurs were limited by their location; now, you can create in Iowa and sell in California, or even throughout the world.
Grow your loyal followers. Today, blogs on Internet marketing often focus on the importance of building one’s brand and readership by forming strong relationships with readers and customers. But Gentile says big numbers aren’t the only goal. Her website gets about 1,000 visitors a day, which is relatively low compared with some of the big-name blogs, but it’s plenty considering how much revenue she brings in from those visitors.
Stop planning and take action. One common mistake for would-be freelancers is taking too long to start selling a service or product. “People have a hard time knowing how to put out a small test of something they can bring into the market and see if it works. Sometimes they’re thinking of a huge detailed plan when really they just need to bring one thing out. You want to get it out into the market as soon as you can to test it,” says Slim.
Sometimes, says Guillebeau, people fear getting started because they worry about being rejected by the marketplace. He met one aspiring photographer who delayed setting up his website to sell prints because he worried no one would like them. When he finally launched his site, he made a sale within two weeks, and that helped affirm he was on the right path.
Stay optimistic. “There’s no such thing as overnight success, but if you start out with a lack of optimism, you’re doomed,” says Johnson. That’s why believing a entrepreneurial project will be a success is so essential–you have to keep your energy up to get through the hurdles.
Enjoy the rewards of your labor. About a year ago, Ralph Callaway, 27, decided to leave his IT services job in San Francisco, which involved helping companies customize databases and sales data, after realizing freelancing would allow him to also pursue his travel goals and have more control over his schedule. He has since figured out how to juggle multiple clients, work without the comfort of water-cooler talk, and find new clients on his own. In exchange for overcoming those challenges, he gets to decide how much–or how little–he works each week, and he now earns more than he did as a full-time employee. Says Callaway: “I love what I do and I get to do it in a different way every day.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-your-future/mastering-freelance-economy-194634873.html
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