Today’s guest blog is by Anna Barcelos, a full-time marketer, mom and owner of ALB MarCom that helps small businesses with limited budgets leverage marketing efforts to get the exposure of larger organizations. Anna blogs at lifeinmarketing.blogspot.com.

Having been in the business to business (B2B) world all my career and now starting to slowly enter the consumer market in my current responsibilities, I’m finding that marketing of any size or in any market has similarities. I believe everyone (Yes, you!) has something they are good at and should always take it as far as they can. Whether or not you want to get paid (at least initially) for being good at something there are some small steps you can take to help you get there, and they may not happen in this order, but make them happen!

1. Start a blog right now!
It’s free and a perfect forum for you to talk about what you love to do and get the word out. Despite working full time as I currently do, one of my goals was to make time to start a blog, and I did it! Of course, I would love to have daily posts, but know that’s not realistic so I try for once or twice a month. I get to talk about things that may help people with their businesses, other marketers, or people who are on the edge of the pool but are not quite ready to dive in and start something new, whether business or personal. One thing I’ve learned is dive in that pool now! A blog is a nice jump to get you started. Read the rest of this entry »

One expression that I hear frequently now that I am an entrepreneur is: Don’t take it personally.

I’ve heard this from several entrepreneurs, investors, coaches, friends, family, you name it. Usually it comes up in a conversation where I talk about a difficult issue or challenge I am facing, or something that is not going as well as I’d like.”Don’t take it personally,” they say, and I nod to move the conversation along.

But I feel like I need to go on some kind of a public record here and say that I don’t buy that argument, not for a minute. To me, business is all about being personal. It’s both the most exciting and the most excruciatingly difficult part of being an entrepreneur. When I see a member being helped by other members on the site, when I get a note from someone saying they love Work It, Mom!, when I read a great member article, note, or blog post, I feel an unbelievable kind of pride and satisfaction. When we’re not growing as quickly as I’d like, when we release a new feature or design element that’s not working well, when a competitor does something better than we do, I feel responsible, stressed, and upset. I take it personally and I could not imagine not doing that.

Frankly, I didn’t think anyone could not take their business personally, but apparently I am wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s guest blog post is by Wendy, the rockin’ founder of emomsathome.com. Following up on my post yesterday about overcoming fears of failure as an entrepreneur, this is Wendy’s perspective on the topic. It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of hers–read this, it will give you a fresh perspective whether or not you’re an entrepreneur.

Is it Fear of Failure or Fear of Success That Is Holding You Back?

My second home based business was a great freelance graphic design business. I ran it for 4 years from home, never took on any debt, and made money every year (until the end… but that’s another story). There were several times in which I tried to figure out how to grow the company without taking on more clients - and the obvious solution was to subcontract some of my work out to other freelancers.

This worked for a while, but I found that I was a little lot outside of my comfort zone to delegate work - especially work that had “my name on it”. I wanted to run the show - wanted to maintain control. At the time, I knew I was dealing with an internal struggle - and deducted that I was just afraid of failing :: that if I didn’t control all of the pieces of the puzzle, something would go terribly wrong.

So I eventually stopped trying.

It wasn’t until few years later that I realized that perhaps it wasn’t fear of failure at all. In fact, I was damn good at failing :: I failed to follow up on a ton of leads, failed to grow my business to the level I wanted, failed to manage my time efficiently, and in the end the burnout got to me and I ended up closing my doors (which may or may not be considered a failure - for me, it truly was the right time to move on).

It was a dear friend who helped me to see that failing was indeed comfortable for me. What I was actually afraid of was becoming a success. Megan over at eBay Selling for eParents wrote a heartfelt post about this yesterday. And instead of buttoning up her article, she left it open ended and asked for some input from others.

So here’s what I have found. Becoming successful has a whole slew of perceived baggage that comes with it: I feared that if I became hugely successful…

• Friendships and relationships would change because I would become more successful than the people I loved
• That success would go to my head and I would become a raving bi*ch (hahaha) Read the rest of this entry »

Since we just moved I’ve been meeting new people all the time. Inevitably the “What do you do?” question comes up to which I answer that I started my own company recently. The responses usually take the form of “Wow, that’s exciting!” and I nod and smile politely in agreement.

But let me be honest here. What I’ve learned from my six-month stint as a full-time, no security blanket entrepreneur is that mostly, it’s freakin’ scary. Yes, I said scary. It IS exciting, and wonderful, and amazing, and gutsy, and interesting, and fulfilling, and many other adjectives, but every single day, it’s scary. And it’s the kind of scary that I’ve not experienced before–a deeply ingrained, constant state of scary vs. something that just comes and goes. To be perfectly clear–or too honest, as a friend who has been reading this blog recently said to me–here are some things I am scared of:

• I am scared of failure. I am really really scared of failure. Work It, Mom! is something I’ve created and I’ve gone out into the world saying “Hey, world! We need a community for working moms called Work It, Mom! and I am going to create it and make it into a real business.” The odds of success are tiny, the fear of failure is huge. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, I am writing this right on the heels of my post about how working on a flexible schedule can put tons of stress on your marriage. But while it does take some organization to succeed when working from home it is something that so many working moms say they’d love to find a way to do. Since we’ve launched Work It, Mom! I get several emails weekly from moms asking for advice about starting an online business, which is, by the way, a great type of business to work on from home.

But I am not an expert on online businesses you can start and run from home. So I asked someone who is to share some practical advice with you. Her name is Wendy Piersall and she is the founder of eMOMSATHOME.COM, a great site for parents who run internet-based businesses and work from home. I recently met Wendy at Blogher and she is one smart lady. She is also a mom. Here is a great post from her about starting a home-based online business:

Can anyone make money online? I do believe so. But not everyone WILL make money online, because as I have said before, making money on the internet takes a long time to learn, and most people give up because it can be extremely frustrating.

My one piece of advice for starting an internet home business is this :: Don’t expect to make any real money for 365 days (or so!) . Although I will add that service-based businesses tend to bring in revenue faster, I would still allow for a full year to replace your outside-the-home salary.

The good news about this industry is that as long as you are willing to put in the hours (days… weeks…. months….. ) to learn the ropes, you can bootstrap your business with extremely little money, generally speaking. Some businesses take more to start than others. I’ve probably directly invested less than $3000 getting this blog up and running, and now revenue is increasing at about a 125-140% pace every month after being in business for 16 months.

So, where do you start from here? Some general rules of thumb:

1. Pre-packaged programs only work as much as you can customize it and make it unique and your own. Even then, techniques that work for one niche won’t work in all niches.
2. Be wary of any “system” that promises instant results (especially anything that sounds like a get-rich-quick scheme!)
3. Knowing the basics of html, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media, and traditional marketing and sales are a must.
4. Every business is made stronger by specializing in a tight niche. Know your audience and stick to it.

Unless you have a brilliant tech idea that makes venture capitalists drool, you need to determine where your strengths are and which business model you plan on following (and you don’t need this list). I have run three home-based businesses in my life, all of which leveraged my current skill set as the foundation for building the business.

Look over the following list and single out the ones in which you have at least some experience. You probably won’t have all of the skills necessary, so don’t let that stop you! All you have to do is work hard and be willing to learn.

Click here for Wendy’s list of 10 Internet Businesses You Can Start In Your Underwear.

Are you a mom who runs a business from your home? Tell us about it and how you got started in the comments section.

We have many moms on this site who are running their own businesses or are considering making the leap and doing it. Maybe you call yourself an entrepreneur, or a business owner, or a freelancer. Either way, you’re out there, creating your own work and doing it despite the many risks and challenges. This post is for you. I’ve recently published it over at the Huffington Post and it’s been fun reading through other entrepreneur reactions and comments. I hope that you will shares yours!

5 Dark Secrets of Entrepreneurship: What (Almost) No One Tells You About Starting Your Own Company

Before becoming an entrepreneur I worked with many of them closely for five years. I watched them start, grow, exit, ruin, and shut down their companies. You’d think there would be few things about starting a company that would surprise me. You would be wrong.

During my still-very-short tenure as an entrepreneur I’ve discovered many things that have surprised me. Here is my list of 5 Dark Secrets of Entrepreneurship. I’m sure it’s not exhaustive.

1. An entrepreneur, you feel stupid much more often than you feel smart.

Most entrepreneurs I’ve met in my time as a VC were really smart. Not all had good business ideas or solid management skills, but they were sharp. At the risk of sounding self-indulgent, I think of myself as a generally smart person. And yet, as I’ve been working on launching my company, I’ve felt dumb and stupid more often than I care to share. I’ve made bad decisions, wrong choices that in retrospect seem so easy to have been avoided, and I’ve learned a great deal about things I thought I already knew a lot about. Entrepreneurship is all about trying and building new things. Regardless of how smart you might be, doing something completely new and making endless mistakes can be stupefying.

(Now, I’m no Marc Andreessen and perhaps after a few billion dollar companies under my belt I’d feel less stupid starting my next one, but I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll email Marc to weigh in on this.)

2. Everyone is your greatest fan when you start, but support wears off quickly.

When I told friends and business contacts that I was starting my own company, the enthusiasm was overwhelming. It was like going from one cheer-on session to another, with tons of encouraging emails and calls sprinkled in between. It felt great and gave me a lot of confidence about what I was doing.

But this overwhelming support began to wear off as time went on. The big news about my new gig wasn’t news anymore and support quickly turned into feedback. Feedback is great — it’s useful and necessary. But it came in heavy non-stop doses. EVERYONE I knew wanted to give me tips on everything from what our website should look like to how I should word our email newsletters. Emails that began with: “Hi, I was just checking out your site and wanted to give you some advice,” became very frequent. I found myself with a strong urge for those great support-filled emails that flooded my inbox earlier on. As maybe too few entrepreneurs will tell you, we need as much cheerleading as we can get.

3. Regardless of your confidence level, you will often experience crises of confidence.

Most entrepreneurs I know are generally confident people. I don’t think it’s possible to take on the enormous amount of risk starting a company requires without being confident in your ability to overcome it. Apparently experts agree, which makes me even more confident in this assumption.

But being an entrepreneur involves consistently overcoming crises of confidence. You feel hopeless about making progress, you think your business is doomed, you think you’ve made the worst decisions ever. This is a crisis of confidence and you have to work very hard to overcome it. It’s a horrible feeling.

4. Nothing is ever right on the first try.

Your website design needs to be re-done. You hired the wrong sales guy. You strategy is wrong. Your name is spelled wrong on your newly ordered business cards.

Nothing works on the first try and regardless of how much you expect this, you feel crushed when it happens and you think you’ll get it right the second time around. Sometimes you do, but often you don’t. Our company is four months old and we’ve redesigned the homepage twice, modified our focus, changed many of our tactical feature implementations. Intellectually, I knew this is part of the process — everything is iterative and you learn only by doing. Emotionally this is rough because it often leads to #3.

5. You will take everything personally.

This morning an email came into the info box. It was from a woman who is married but chose not to have children. She spent three paragraphs writing about how prejudicial, judgmental, demeaning, biased, and damaging it was to create a site for professional moms (vs one for professional women). I read the email quickly and moved on to the next one. But it kept nagging me as I worked. I wanted to reply, to tell her the many reasons why I disagreed with her. I took it personally.

Now, some of you might want to dismiss this as a woman-thing, but don’t. I’ve now met enough entrepreneurs who say this is true — and they never admitted it to me until I became one of them.

What am I missing? Share your favorite dark secret of entrepreneurship in the comments.

For the past 10 years I’ve worked in an office environment. Some were better than others, and all came with their share of office politics, interesting personalities, and pleasant and unpleasant dynamics. Now I work from home, until we get our office space set up for Work It, Mom! There are things I love about it but there are things that I miss about being in an office.

Today what I miss is distraction that is easily attained in any office environment, just by walking over to a colleague or chatting with co-workers in the hallway.

This weekend kicked my butt, in many senses of the word, and I’m glad it’s over. But as I sat down to start my work this morning, I couldn’t focus -I knew I needed to do the weekend-download-chit-chat before I could get some work done. But there is no water cooler to walk over to and no co-worker in the next office to distract.

We had some great discussion about the benefits of working in a corporate environment on Work It, Mom! last week. (Check out Kathy’s blog post and Florinda’s article.) I’d love to hear your thoughts on which you prefer - working at home or in the office - as well as any tips on how to simulate some of the great things about being in an office when you work from home.

Are you an entrepreneur or are thinking of starting your own business?

Don’t count on venture capital dollars to get you funded. While women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men in the US, a tiny percentage of venture capital money is actually funding these businesses - according to Forbes, less than 3% of venture capital dollars are invested in women-founded businesses.

Wow.

Even if you aren’t an entrepreneur this should cause your jaw to drop.

During my 5 years in venture capital I spent quite a bit of time thinking about why more women entrepreneurs were not getting funded. While we had some companies in our portfolio that were being run by women as CEOs - and by the way, those companies were, with one exception, in the top third of our companies, based on performance - we did not fund one company that was founded by a woman entrepreneur. I rarely saw women founders come to pitch to us and when I got involved with a few organizations focused on helping women entrepreneurs get funding, we oten had trouble finding great companies to connect with vcs.

Why is this going on?

In my opinion, there are two main reasons:

Reason #1: There are very few women in venture capital. In fact, less than 10% of partners and principals (i.e. people who can make investment decisions) in venture capital are women. Go ahead and name another industry that is this pathetic in this respect. And the reason this matters is because it is part of our human nature to connect with and network with people who are more like us. So if there are few women in venture capital controlling investment dollars it is extremely difficult to women entrepreneurs to get access to that capital.

Reason #2: Some (many?) women entrepreneurs do not want to raise venture capital. Many are starting service-based businesses that don’t need this type of funding and some want to maintain more control over their business (which does not happen often if you take venture money). The two founders of Work It, Mom! - Victoria and myself - spent years in senior positions in venture capital and certainly have access and networks for it. But for now we’re choosing not to go that route; we want to bootstrap our business and to build it into a real company before we even consider raising lots of money. In other words, we want to do it at our own pace.

I am sure there are other reasons, but after a lot of thinking, these are my top two. If you’d like to read some lively discussion on this topic, check out this post by Fred Wilson, one of the top VCs in New York (read the comments - some interesting perspectives!)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, so please post a comment. If you are an entrepreneur are you planning to raise money? Why or why not? Do you feel that as a woman you are at a disadvantage?

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P.S. I found this article after I wrote this post, but if you want some much smarter people’s opinion on why so few women receive venture (and angel, accoding to this article) funding, check it out.

For years before Victoria and I launched Work It, Mom! I worked in the little-known world of venture capital. My job was to find great start-up companies, invest money in them, and then help them grow. (Well, dealing with personalities and egos of other investors was a big part of my job also, but that’s a whole other blog post.) My favorite part of the job was getting to know the amazing entrepreneurs that started these companies - I found them to be some of the most creative, courageous, hard-working, and interesting people I’ve ever met. It always amazed me how they managed to keep building their companies despite tremendous difficulties and challenges.

I had lunch with one of these entrepreneurs the other day and when I told him that I’ve started my own company, he smiled. When I asked why, he said that he is glad that I will finally understand first-hand what he has been going through. “If you didn’t know how tough it was for me to do what I did, then I know you will now,” he said.

Doing is understanding. This is my mantra for today.

Launching Work It, Mom! and working to grow it, to get the word out there about it, to make sure we have the best offering for our members, has been the most thrilling and difficult thing I’ve personally ever done. (Funny, it’s almost exactly what I say about becoming a parent.) We’re working 20 hours a day, things don’t always go as we’d like and as with all start-ups in early stages the climb is most definitely uphill. And then, once you mix in the usual entrepreneurial dose of doubt, pressure, and fear of failure, the climb gets even steeper.

I know many of our members run their own businesses and if you’re one of them, this post is for you - as well as all the other entrepreneur moms out there. You are amazing, strong, and incredibly gutsy and you should be really proud of what you do. Now I know how hard you are really working.

Doing is understanding.

(If you’re an entrepreneur, I’d love to hear from you - share your experience and thoughts by posting a comment!)