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Entrepreneur Confessions

All employees need a head start on greatness and mytimeforce time & attendance solutions help accomplish that goal.

Liz Lange - The Right way to do Fashion

The massive success of Liz Lange, founder of the designer maternity line that carries her name, is a result of Lange’s predisposition to following her instincts.

While working at the fashion mecca Vogue magazine as a writer in 1988, a visit to the studio of an upcoming designer inspired her to go into design. As she looked at the studio and the creative activities, Lange strongly felt that this was what she wanted to do.

Overcoming Adversities to Succeed in the Recruiting Business

As General Patton once said, success is best measured by how high you bounce after hitting rock bottom. Billie Dragoo, President and CEO of RepuStaff and RepuCare, has experienced both highs and lows, to emerge as one of the most powerful women entrepreneurs today.

An Amish Entrepreneur's Old-Fashioned Approach

Imagine trying to build a national food retailing business based on mail order, far-flung distributors, and trade shows—without using the Internet. No e-mail newsletters or Web site for taking orders and handling complaints, no Facebook fans, or Google ads, or Twitter following.

Economy Stalling Your Small Business? Shift Gears

These may not be the best of times to start or run a small business, but Christopher Hazlett’s struggle to hang tough through one crisis after another may hold lessons for the legions of entrepreneurs caught between a stumbling economy and crippling credit squeeze.

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An Inspiring Entrepreneurial Story of Starting a Business During the Recession Without Worrying About Layoffs

I heard this quote when I was driving to work this morning and listening to NPR’s Marketplace. Ms. Battishill works for a homebuilding company in the Los Angeles area. Knowing her job is not safe, she founded ScooterGirls Inc. that offers the ScooterGirls brand of mobile advertising, scooter sales and rental, tour, and the “Commuter Line” Apparel Collection. Although she had excellent credits, no bank was willing to lend her money due to the credit crunch. Determined to take control of her own destiny, Ms. Battishill borrowed 50% of her 401k account to start the business.

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Stop Thinking You Are Going To Fail Just Because Someone Says You Should

Many would be entrepreneurs don’t start their own venture because they are afraid of failure. And quite frankly, they have every right to be afraid. After all, we are constantly bombarded by vague sayings like “9 out of every 10 startups fail” or “chalk up your first startup as a learning experience”, or my favorite, “most relationships and marriages can’t survive a startup”. After you hear enough of these cliches, you soon start believing them.

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Confessions of a Tired Entrepreneur

Then something happened – something I never saw coming.

I had to stop marketing to actually do the work (which I also liked to do) – and then I had to start the process all over again… and again… and again. It was a painful cycle of ebb and flow and I got tired.

Get the work. Do the work. Get the work. Do the work.

I did this for 10 years. Fairly recently, it dawned on me that maybe I should only do one thing at a time, because I simply got too tired to care about my clients and their projects.

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Confessions of an Accidental Entrepreneur

I'm going to tell you a story about an Accidental Entrepreneur.

The accidental entrepreneur was a highly skilled intravenous nurse who thought he could do a better job administering Intravenous Therapy services than the organization he worked for.

So he borrowed $5,000 and started his own business providing intravenous services to patients in their homes. Because he took the risk of starting a business, he believed he was an "entrepreneur." And the fact that he was making money from the start, not only boosted his confidence, but it reinforced his belief that he truly was an entrepreneur.

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A Confession From My Past

When I first started out as an entrepreneur I was unfocused.

I didn't know what I really wanted or how I was going to get there.

I just new that I was magnetically attracted to the options that rich people could access and that I wanted to make and invest money in the same way.

Naturally, I was prone to look closely at any and all manner of opportunity that floated past me.

In 2003 I was at a business networking event and met a young woman promoting a network marketing opportunity.

From Illegal to Entrepreneur

At 24, Carlos Castro fled poverty and El Salvador's bloody civil war, paying about $800 for a coyote to smuggle him into the United States. He was caught at the border and deported, but snuck back into the United States almost immediately.

Now 55 and a U.S. citizen, he's the president of Todos Supermarket, which specializes in foods and services to immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa at stores in Woodbridge and Dumfries.

Young Entrepreneur Success Story -

Dameion Royes

My story is a story of hope, struggle and luck. It is a story of a young boy left behind in Jamaica after my mother and father split up. My mother was left alone with two kids and suddenly was forced to make a hard decision to leave her homeland.

I was only two when my mother left and the next time I saw her I was seven. By that time she was truly a stranger to me and when that cold day in February arrived and it was my brother's and my turn to join her in Canada. There was a strange and disconnected feeling that was shared by all of us.

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Mike Geary Interview - Confessions of an

Internet Marketing Superstar

Barry: If you were to go back to where you were at the beginning, what was the thing that made the big difference from year two to three? What was the thing that eventually made the big breakthrough? What item of knowledge did it take?

Mike: I can be honest and say that I was about to give up, after about a year. I had made the product, made the website, and I kind of had these false hopes that I would just build it and they would come. I had built the website and I would just start getting these massive amounts of sale and everything would take off.

I didn’t realize that actually you had to work really hard to drive traffic and get exposure for your site. So it took a while to learn that. And because I didn’t give up, a couple of years later things started taking off.

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My Biggest Problem as a Startup....

This is extremely hard to boil down…

I could easily write about acquiring new customers, my problems with implementing things quickly, our lack of project management skills, my need for an assistant, my problem of focusing on non-money making ventures or even the fact that we have 3 dogs at our house that contantly interrupt me through out the day.

But I don’t think any of those are the actual problem…

I think the biggest problem I have (and this is incredibly hard to admit) is a mental block. The fear of becoming uber successful.

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The Secret Confessions of a Happy Entrepreneur

Over the last eleven years, I have spent a lot of time and money educating myself on how to build businesses. A university education, my own business coach, 100’s of books, online courses, weekend workshops – it never ended. For years, I strived to always know more in order to keep me ahead of the next business. I was the poster-boy for professional development.

But over the past couple of years, it is fair to say that I have mellowed considerably. While still learning, I have made some small changes in the way I see things and these changes have given me a general feeling of happiness and contentment. No matter how good my business, relationship, bank balance or footy team is doing; life is good.

Who would have thought that you could achieve internal happiness that was not reliant on a big bank balance or having a great business? Defiantly not me.

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Confession Of An Entrepreneur:

Don't Feel Too Lonely, You Are Not Alone, Not At All

At 25 Years old I had no idea what I would do with my life, I was completely lost. I was playing Chess online for few years at that point, and although at the time I inquired about a networking/tech degree, it didn’t make much sense to me. I did not like it that much, and I was definitely not passionate about it. As the story goes, I started domaining, again not because I cared to, but because my mom pushed me into it. Once I started I got hooked, highly passionate, spent every breathing moment learning the ropes, chasing domains, talking to colleagues, and figuring out how others do it, so I can get better at it.

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An Entrepreneur's Greatest Fear

It’s the night before my big launch. My big rebrand. The unveiling of the new me and the new business I’ll be running. My latest Frankenstein.

And I feel like I’m going to puke.

It’s natural… It happens to me every time I launch something big. Before I launched Scratchback, I felt the same way. Everyone does.

It’s the curse of a serial entrepreneur. Yes, we’re very good at taking criticism, and dealing with failure, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have fears like everyone else. It just means we’re good at letting it go after we’ve failed or succeeded, either way.

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Entrepreneurship: Five or More Failures to Success

For example, my first entrepreneurial endeavor was in modeling. I did runway and high fashion in Europe. I gave it my all because I truly loved it. I had some great success, but also way more rejection.

As a model, you deal with rejection daily - even hourly. I knew that out of 10 casting calls I’d go to during any given day, at least nine would say “no” or even all 10. Phew! And I was a model for three years. I dealt with a lot of failure and rejection for three straight years.

With my modeling career, I learned to just shrug it off and keep on going or else fail for sure.

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A True Start-Up Story

Back in 2005 I’ve decided to change jobs, from Project Management to Sales, which ended up as changing Employers as well. Taking out the reasons to change jobs, somewhere in the process I’ve came to realize that no matter how many jobs and employers I will change, I will never probably become really rich (or at least rich enough) as an employee only – I needed to start a business. Later I’ve discovered that having a business doesn’t necessarily and automatically make you rich, but it gives you the opportunity to be rich. Anyway, until I wrote that post about “Entrepreneurship as an Opportunity enhancement” I was really sure I’ve started a business to become rich.

Ok, let’s stick with the story. Once the idea about starting a new business lurked from somewhere, I tried to “sell” my idea to 2 of my best friends – both programmers. We set our goals to make and sell software products, Web Design and other Internet related things, while keeping our day jobs. We created our site in English – we wanted to conquer the World as any Entrepreneur does when it gets past the Entrepreneurship fear- .

Are You Happy? A Personal Exploration of

Women’s Declining Happiness

... In my infinite wisdom, I decided that the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression and one of the worst real estate crises on record would be a perfect time to launch a new division of my business, marketing services for real estate agents. My business has always been my “third baby” and I’ve always worked long days and weekends. But now, it seems, no matter how hard I work I fall farther behind.

“When I’m working, I feel guilty about not being with the kids,” one client – a woman with a high-powered career and two kids in school – told me the other day. “And when I’m with the kids, I feel guilty that I’m not working.” Her sentiments, I would bet, echo the feelings of our generation.

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Tough Lessons to be Learnt in Business Failure

In early 2007 we were working a huge convention with nothing more than a big idea and a lot of nerve. We were hot, and we were flaunting it. We had extraordinary talent and our product was immediately perceived as best in class. Through a flashy presence and sheer force of will, of which I had great reserves, we convinced the market we were the next big thing. Our customers were so engaged with our ingenuity that 20-minute sales calls turned into two-hour brainstorms. At our launch party, our customers came in Lamborghinis and our investors arrived in Bentleys.

Then the first economic tremors hit in early 2008, when fuel topped $4 a gallon and Wall Street wrote off its first round of toxic billions from the bursting of the mortgage bubble.

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The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship

For the last 25 years, entrepreneurship has been widely heralded as the path to fame, fortune, and following your own vision while avoiding working for “The Man.” It’s nice when it works. More times than not, it doesn’t.

Some 70 percent of businesses fail within seven years, according to the Small Business Administration. In the worst cases, the result is not only business failure but also complete financial failure. What I have learned is that the damage doesn’t stop there. I share this with you as an attempt to bring some reality to the conversation about entrepreneurship. It is not just about passion and innovation and bringing your dog to work. It is also about risk, tenacity and fear. It is also about the repercussions of bad luck, bad decisions and bad economies. I know of four business owners in Chicago who have taken their own lives since the economy turned.

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The Hidden Pain of Being an Entrepreneur

Last week, I got a call from a friend of mine who's an entrepreneur that was probably one of the hardest calls he's ever had to make. He was calling to tell me that he hadn’t raised a dime for his fledgling company in six months, hadn’t taken a salary in almost a year and was about to miss his mortgage payment on his house for the third month in a row (after three, the banks tend to begin the foreclosure process).

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Never Say Quit:

VANOC Chairman Jack Poole is a Born Survivor

Today Jack Poole is in the pantheon of B.C. business leaders. He was a pivotal figure in ensuring the Olympics came to Vancouver. To get to this exalted position, he’s had to go through unimaginable hardships: a destitute childhood, an alcoholic father, the loss of a son and the collapse of both his marriage and business. But as he faces his greatest challenge yet, there’s one thing that’s certain: Jack Poole is a born survivor.

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Entrepreneur Confession Page 2...

To Submit your confessions please email them to confessions@makingittv.com