We started small businesses since we first got married over 26 years ago ... this is a list of all successful and less successful ones.
We started selling a book that I wrote as a draft of abstracts called “Mother Natures Remedies: The First Season” that were included in niche magazines such as Mother Earth News and Organic Gardener ... did not sell a single one, and it was expensive advertising dollars without refund.
The sensation of savings and loans hit Houston, where we lived at the time, and we started working on the landscape ... first with the idea of doing "Landscape Design." We had a partner with a botanical degree and experience, but since people were going to foreclose, and the commercial real estate was in a bust, we decided to have a lawn service instead. We collected pilots and sent them to every realtor. Because there were so many FHA and VA foreclosures, and they were built in divisions with Home Owners Associations ... FHA and VA were supposed to "maintain" yards, or Home Owners Associations would slap home deposits for violating the Homeowners Association Agreement. Our small company received contracts to keep yards of foreclosed homes in the amount of 80 homes per day and at 25.00 / yard. We started working on the work itself, but it was a lot, so we had to hire Subcontractors to make yards that we could not. Why "Subcontractors"? Because we did not want to pay for comp workers. They used their trucks, but our equipment ... sometimes they used our trucks ... they billed us for each yard, and we billed to realtors who listed the houses. It was a profitable company and a profitable business.
At the same time, I started working in an interior designer in Houston, who had a very good reputation. I will teach her course in her offices or in my offices or at Rice University. We would teach the average housewife how to make her house a showcase without hiring an interior designer. We also taught interior design students who failed in their courses how to get around and excel in their field. The woman who designed the course, Athalee Curry, was the most brilliant woman and taught principles that were more common sense than anything else. Because of her approach, this company has been successful. Together we made projects for model houses and other clients. It was also a profitable and successful business, and I was able to learn some business principles from Athalee that paid off.
When we moved from Houston to Idaho, I applied the same principles to put my companies in a different state, but there was simply no thinking. Hiring a "lawn care company" or "interior designer" was just not what was done here. These were the Do-It-Yourselfers and Home-made people who didn’t have too much income to “hire” him, and they didn’t have the inclination to “teach” them, so these companies didn & dont work here.
In 1984 I sang in the South, I had a video on VH1, my songs were on the radio, and I did a lot of television appearances. When I moved here to Idaho, there were several people from the South who recognized me and asked me if I would teach them or their children how to sing and penetrate the industry. It was a new business that I have been running since 1991 and has been successful. I started in my living room and with scant equipment. When my clients began to grow, I would again invest in better equipment. Sometimes I could get equipment for a recording studio. Word of mouth and my reputation started the growth of my business, the show and the success of my students kept my reputation solid, and my business was successful. Now I only learn the voice when I want. I taught others the same methods that I developed in voice teaching, and was even successful enough to be able to work with Warren Barigan in the Vocal Bio-matrix and work on therapy sessions on my own.
When I was in school, I started to do makeup and makeup. I would sell them to my kindergarten friend, and my parents just thought it was cute. I was four years old when I read my first set of encyclopedias, so I did research and study. My grandmother was a woman-medicine in Samoa ... she taught me the ancient ways, and when I grew up, I combined my traditional Western education with its ethno-botanical healing methods. I worked at a medical company that was a subsidiary of the Baylor Medical College and started working in the Food Oncology approach. I developed a nutritional foundation that would prolong the life of a cancer patient for 18 months if they used certain chemotherapists. The studies and tests put forward by the FDA are extremely expensive and biased for download, so I decided that I did not want to release this formula with FDA restrictions.
At about the same time, Congress passed a bill on supplements that correspond to our company "T". We formed a corporation, put the board of directors together with doctors and pharmacists and continued in this enterprise ... which turned out to be a complete disaster. We followed all the recommendations of the SBA, we went to the Center for Economic Development and got help ... and the doctors, pharmacists and veterinarians used our products and tested them, and we had 98% success in everything we put out. .. and still failed. My husband was diagnosed with Insulin Resistance, and he could not endure a restricted diet. As a research scientist, I knew that sugar alcohols are still absorbing, I knew that aspartame is glutamate and will increase his insulin, causing great complications with his blood sugar ... Spend was not good, because chlorine would increase his blood pressure and caused some other problems ... so he asked me to come up with an alternative. I started a new company in Functional Foods. I wanted the product I encountered to be not only a sweetener, but also the addition of health benefits to the body. Sweeteners are a funny thing ... the body cannot say one sugar from another and synthetics, well, the body simply does not know what to do with them! However, the transport systems of sugars know the difference, so there is a transport system for glucose and one for fructose. I came up with sugar, which can lower blood sugar and suppress the absorption of carbohydrates.
We started our company, and a few months later we were engaged in production, a week after manufacturing a small amount, we had the first sale, in a few weeks we had our first national sales, in a couple of months we sold 100,000.00 / month to the very famous national company and one of the countries leading leading medical institutions. Since August 2003, this company has sold SugarBlend nationally to our customers.
It was a difficult journey, and success did not come overnight. There were many business partners along the way who wanted to steal everything, there were investors along the way who wanted to steal everything ... we were in court several times because of this ... a potential investor stole 18,000.00, removed from the table and cashed it. .. that almost let us down. We had people who wanted to give us licensing agreements, our friends who told us ... we will never harm you! and then would take all the money, never pay the fees and leave with almost everything, until we paid the price, losing 780,000.00 in one year ... lost to friends who "never hurt us" and didn't make would have us become bankrupt. Our company is still strong, and sales of our products are still growing, growth is slow and methodical, which is conservative growth, but it is growth.
So, what would I advise those who want to start a small business and succeed? At first I would say, run ... do not go ... this is not the fault of the heart! Check your area if it is a service, and see if there really is a need and a mind that you want to offer. Check out the competition and do your homework to make sure this company is viable. Then, take your ducks in a row, decide how you want your company to run, to move and grow. Make plans and goals, if you do not achieve these goals, then you need to go back and redesign the attack plan and your methods. Know about business partners ... do you need it? ... Can you do it yourself ... are you badly killed? Can you accept criticism and could they? Can you hire experience? It can be easier if you can do it. Re-invest ... The budget of your profits so that you do not need a bank or an investor ... Banks are a terrible place to get a loan or something else! If you do not succeed, they will take fillings from your teeth to get your money back! ... they will bankrupt you faster than an investor. Investors ... if you plan correctly, you don’t need your money, if you don’t plan correctly, they will ultimately own all your hard work and something else they can ... just like banks. The saying ... "Those who have rules for gold," is true, so their gold is simply not needed. The last bit of advice that I would give is ... If you are busy yourself ... this will be your life, your whole life, so make sure the sacrifices are worth it, and some just don’t.
