Million Dollar Women

The Essential Guide for Female Entrepreneurs Who Want to Go Big

Julia Pimsleur

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781476790305
• eBook ISBN: 9781476790329
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

The “useful and inspiring” (Diane von Furstenberg) guide for female entrepreneurs who want to take their businesses into the big leagues.

“Do you have an ambitious vision for your business, but aren’t sure what to do next? Successful entrepreneur Julia Pimsleur provides an invaluable guide for any woman who wants to make a big jump” (Gretchen Rubin, author of Better Than Before and The Happiness Project).

Over the past twenty years, women in the US have started nearly twice as many businesses as men, but only three percent of all women business owners ever make revenues of one million dollars or more. Most are stuck running kitchen-table businesses, just getting by, or in many cases, running out of cash. Julia Pimsleur aims to change that with Million Dollar Women, which will show you how to take your business to that million-dollar mark and beyond.

Million Dollar Women introduces you to Pimsleur and seven other women who have raised capital, developed powerful networks, and built multimillion-dollar companies from scratch. It teaches you the concepts and the vocabulary you need to secure funding and scale up. It explains how to make the right connections, when to delegate, and when to seek coaching and support. Drawing on her own experience of becoming a CEO, Pimsleur also provides help for overcoming the hurdles you have to clear to leap to that next level. “With thought-provoking interviews of women entrepreneurs and other business experts and important exercises at the end, this resourceful book is rich in ideas and valuable insight” (Booklist).

1

HOW I GOT OFF THE ENTREPRENEUR’S HAMSTER WHEEL

To be successful at running a small business, we need to work hard and keep driving forward. And yet positive traits like perseverance and diligence may turn us into little hamsters, turning the wheel with increasing speed but not getting anywhere. This attitude of “I’ll just work harder” is a very female approach to getting ahead and may be the very thing that prevents us from taking our businesses big.

I myself was on that wheel for four years, running as fast as I could as a small business owner. Until things started falling apart, I didn’t even stop to ask whether that exertion was taking me where I wanted to go. The wake-up call came when one of my advisors told me, “You can be low on cash for a long time, but you can only run out of cash once.” I had bills that were starting to exceed the incoming checks, and we hadn’t found a way to turbocharge our sales.

In the end, I managed to avoid running out of money, and I ultimately went on to raise capital and build a multimillion-dollar company. But before I explain how all that happened, I need to rewind a bit. My entrepreneurial story actually starts way back, in a time that most of us would prefer to forget: middle school.

DIAPERING FOR DOLLARS

On the first day of my summer vacation at the end of eighth grade, I rode in the backseat of an Audi with two little boys to the Hamptons, where many well-to-do New York families spend summer vacations.

I was to be a mother’s helper, working for an exasperated Manhattan mom, Marilyn. She was happy just to have help, any help, with her rowdy three- and five-year-old boys, even from a fourteen-year-old girl with little actual experience.

The job entailed living in their unfinished basement and spending endless hours on the floor crashing Matchbox cars while making explosion sound effects. I was at the beck and call of frazzled Marilyn and weathered verbal abuse from her husband, a disgruntled day-trading dad who joined us on weekends. This job wore perilously thin after about two weeks.

On the beach I met up with other indentured servants like myself, teenage girls doing one of the only money-making jobs available to us: diapering for dollars. After the first month, three of the girls had quit, preferring to go back to Manhattan and dodge cockroaches and piles of smelly garbage in the city streets rather than suffer one more day of little Michael’s fits when his chicken wasn’t cut up the right way.

By August it was down to just one other mother’s helper and me, commiserating on beaches over sand-laced French fries. I did feel quite grown up, having two young children in my charge, and I did have my first make-out session on a waterbed, but overall I was pretty miserable. I remember when my last remaining mother’s helper friend decided to bail. I wanted so much to follow her! Even though the boys insisted on playing the soundtrack from Annie on a twenty-four-hour loop and the day-trading dad said inappropriate things to me like “You will probably be fat by the time you are eighteen,” I still stayed. I simply didn’t want to be a quitter.

On my last day Marilyn came down to the basement and handed me a $100 tip. On top of the $85 per week I had made, I had cleared nearly $1,000. It was a heady feeling for a girl of fourteen, and I was hooked right then on financial freedom. I went back to the Hamptons the following two summers and racked up several thousand dollars, which I saved to spend in part on a four-week trip to Italy with my best friend at age seventeen. I managed to pick better and better families each time I went back to the Hamptons, and those summers turned out to be a terrific first business school. On those beaches I learned some of the most important skills I needed to set me up for my career: hard work, patience, and keeping the clients happy.

I had also stumbled on one of the most important ingredients of entrepreneurship, the one that would later allow me to create a company, narrowly avoid bankruptcy, and fire people who had to go: grit. Without grit, of which a key part is resilience, no one has any business going into business. As any entrepreneur will tell you, whatever can go wrong will—and usually within the first year. Those who have grit keep on going and, like water around rocks, find a new way forward. Those who don’t pack up and go back to their cubicle.

Grit got me pretty far in life. I had always prided myself on being a hard worker who cruised down long task lists. Even as a young mother with two kids, I was the one who created the class contact list and ran the parent book club. I loved to think I was the walking example of “Ask a busy person if you want to get something done.”

But over time I realized that grit had also become a liability. I was so good at hunkering down and getting the job done, so focused on taking care of others, that I couldn’t see the bigger picture. Grit wasn’t going to give me the confidence to take the greater risks I needed to take to scale up my business. Grit wasn’t going to convince institutional investors to bet on me. How could I take my $150,000-per-year company and turn it into a $1.5-million and eventually a $15-million-per-year company? Not by buckling down and working eighty hours instead of sixty. I realized I needed to change how I was working, not just how much.

One of my coaches, Gina Mollicone-Long, likes to invoke an old proverb about change: “You can’t cross a twenty-foot chasm in two ten-foot leaps.” Sometimes you have to come up with a totally new plan to catapult yourself to the other side—or risk falling into the abyss after your first big leap.

THE BIRTH OF LITTLE PIM

Fast-forward twenty-something years from middle school. When my first son, Emmett, was born, teaching him French was high on my priorities list. I was raised bilingual in French and English, and this led to what I considered some of my most valuable experiences: scholarships to top schools, the confidence that comes from being effortlessly good at something, living and working in France, and jobs in international film production. I was determined to give Emmett these same advantages in life. Besides, language education runs in our family. My father, Dr. Paul Pimsleur, created a language-learning method that’s still widely used today. He passed away when I was eight, but has left behind a legacy I have always been extremely proud of: the Pimsleur Method. I love meeting people all over the world who have used Pimsleur to become conversational in French, Spanish, or Chinese and can say “Will you have a drink with me at seven o’clock?” in multiple Pimsleur languages!

I was lucky that I became fluent in French at age six and don’t even remember learning. We were living in Paris for my father’s work, and I attended a French public school. My brother and I became bilingual in a matter of three months, and this has paid off over my entire lifetime. How was I going to give this gift to my son Emmett here in the United States? I sang him traditional French lullabies like “Frère Jacques” and spoke to him in French whenever we played, but I knew it would require far more exposure for him to grasp the language. My husband didn’t speak French, and we had plans to hire a full-time sitter when I went back to work. She was great with babies, but she didn’t speak French either.

As I watched Emmett’s fascination with anything involving a screen, whether it was my phone, Sesame Street, or made-for-children DVDs, it dawned on me: Would he know the difference if I put on a French video instead? I wanted to start exposing him to the sounds and accents of the French language but still keep him entertained. I searched the Internet and bookstores for language-teaching materials and found a French DVD made for babies, which I played for him. It had low production values, and even worse, was riddled with translation mistakes.

Still on maternity leave, I had some time on my hands and started researching the impact of learning a second language at an early age. I knew intuitively and from my own experience that young was the best time to learn, but was still surprised when I started finding study after study showing that zero-to-six is a critical window during which we can learn up to three languages with ease. After age six there is a steep drop-off in our ability to learn a second language, and another after age ten. And meanwhile, try as I might, I could not find a language DVD for Emmett that I didn’t want to fling across the room after five minutes.

In the made-for-TV version of my story, I would then have gone out and raised $3 million, created an award-winning series, opened offices with a staff of ten, and grown the company to $15 million in revenues within two years.

What really happened was this: while breast-feeding, going back to my full-time job, and being semi-delirious from lack of sleep, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that someone should create a better way for kids to learn languages. It should be a video series specifically designed for young children, with a toddler-friendly character and rich content. Someone who cared about languages. Someone who could make high-quality videos. It took a full three months to realize that someone was me.

I had been a documentary filmmaker. I loved languages and spoke several and came from the Pimsleur family, considered language-teaching “royalty” in some circles. Plus, I was a mom. But I was making a significant portion of our family’s income at that time, and my husband, Darren, had just started a demanding new job. How would my starting a business affect our finances and our relationship? Besides, I hadn’t gone to business school. Not to mention, I had a baby at home and didn’t want to detract from being the best mother I could be. And—oh, right—I didn’t have the cash.

But as any entrepreneur will tell you, sometimes an idea takes on a life of its own; it keeps coming around like a stray cat for food until you take it in permanently. I talked to my family about the idea for a language-teaching DVD series, and my husband and mother both agreed that it sounded like a great business opportunity. Darren suggested I create language schools for young children, but that was far less appealing to me. I didn’t like the idea of managing dozens and ultimately hundreds of people or having to deal with finding locations and getting permits to hold classes. Plus, the DVD series called on my background as a filmmaker and felt like something I could start on the side, without quitting my job. I also knew instinctively what I didn’t yet have the business words for: that the media company was more scalable than the schools company. The margins were higher, and making DVDs would be a onetime sunk cost that could then be recouped over time.

My mother came up with the idea that the main teacher of the series should be a panda bear, which seemed like a toddler-friendly and original choice. We liked the idea of a panda in part because babies see black and white better than color, and panda bears come from China, introducing children to the idea of another country. I found an undiscovered illustrator online who created a rotund and delightfully mischievous-looking panda for a nominal fee. We named the character “Little Pim” and our little language teacher was born.

Bit by bit I moved on to other parts of the business: my lawyer friend Dominique Bravo helped me draw up contracts with the illustrator and file for a copyright. A neuroscientist friend of the family, Dr. April Benasich, who is well known for her research on how babies and toddlers learn languages, signed on as an advisor. I recruited two bright Columbia Business School students to help me flesh out a business plan. We began meeting every other Saturday for an hour and a half (they worked for yogurt parfaits at Le Pain Quotidien bakery), and they helped me map out how Little Pim could become a viable business. They used exclusive business databases at Columbia to research the trajectory of successful DVD companies and to find stats on the educational video market.

Still, I did not quit my job or even consider it. My husband was earning a decent salary, but not enough to support all three of us or fund a new business. We had nominal savings. Furthermore I loved my job as a nonprofit fundraiser, working with Echoing Green, an organization that granted fellowships to social change makers. I had good benefits, smart colleagues, meaningful work, and manageable hours. But I couldn’t get Little Pim out of my head. When Emmett was napping or if I couldn’t fall back asleep after an early-morning breast-feeding, I would sketch story-boards of Little Pim the panda and his adventures and pore over children’s books with titles like First Thousand Words in French.

The business research the Columbia grad students did suggested that there was a large and expanding market for kids’ educational videos. The family DVD market alone was $5.3 billion, and language learning worldwide was $85 billion. Rosetta Stone, the market leader in the United States, was making over $250 million per year. But it was harder to estimate how many parents cared about foreign-language learning for kids. I was passionate about it, and I knew other parents in New York and other major cities who felt the same way, but what about parents across the United States? And around the world? We realized we were likely going after a niche market of parents who cared, but I was convinced there was a broader interest in foreign-language teaching for kids that had not yet been tapped. Capitalizing on the Pimsleur brand, with a cute panda teacher and high-quality videos, I felt we could drive demand and expand the market for early-language learning beyond what it had been. I was also passionate about what I saw as “democratizing” early-language learning—why should this incredible benefit be available only to kids of the 1 percent whose parents could afford a foreign-born nanny or expensive language classes? Little Pim would be sold for the same price as other children’s videos and make language learning possible for millions of young children.

I decided to take the Little Pim idea to the publishing company that had bought the rights to the Pimsleur Method from our family some ten years earlier. It made perfect sense to me that a publisher would want to expand its language empire into selling a product for little kids, and I went to my first meeting full of optimism. The Pimsleur Method had become one of the best-selling methods for adults. My mother still received royalties, but otherwise we were no longer involved in the business. I was welcomed by the publishing executives, and that meeting led to more meetings. But six months later I had been through four rounds of meetings and had not yet gotten a real yes or no.

FORGET ABOUT THE BIG BOYS

In the midst of the hurry-up-and-wait meetings with the publishing company that winter and spring, Darren and I decided to go to Vietnam for ten days, our first big trip since we had become parents. We left two-year-old Emmett with Darren’s parents in California and set off for Hanoi, the capital. In Vietnam there was widespread poverty; everyone seemed to be working so hard yet earning so little. As we traveled through the lush green countryside crisscrossed with rice fields, I thought about the lives of the young mothers I saw. Entire families were huddled around buckets of water, bathing and cooking. I felt deeply humbled when I thought about my own life and dreams for my son and realized that the greatest hope a young mother had for her son here was that he work in Hanoi as a waiter and escape the $1-per-day wages of the rice fields.

As we traveled south to the coastal town of Hoi An, I began to think seriously about the privileges I had back home (a job, a supportive family, degrees from prestigious institutions) and suddenly felt I had no excuse for not trying to create this new business. So what if the publishing company didn’t want to partner with me? So what if I hadn’t gone to business school? What was the worst thing that could happen? If it didn’t work out, I could always go back to fundraising for nonprofits.

I also thought about my great-grandmother Ada Goldwater, a Russian Jewish immigrant who had opened a cigarette and candy shop on lower Broadway in New York in the early 1900s. Her husband died at thirty-six of appendicitis, leaving her with six young children. Thanks to that shop, she provided for her children all through the Depression and beyond. Her daughter Meira, my maternal grandmother, went on to have an important career in the days when women rarely got past secretary; she was the chief of acquisitions for the law library at Columbia University for fifty years. Meira’s sister, my amazing great-aunt Beatie, who was four feet, ten inches tall and wore signature cat’s-eye glasses, used to always remind me that I come from a long line of enterprising women. “Just remember,” she’d say in her heavy New York accent, “Goldwater girls are smart!”

I finally realized I shouldn’t wait for the big boys in publishing to decide my fate. If Little Pim was going to happen, it was up to me, and me alone, to move ahead. To borrow one of my own metaphors from my nonprofit fundraising days: people like to board a train that is leaving the station. The Little Pim train needed to blow the whistle and get moving.

OUR FIRST OUTSIDE INVESTORS

I decided to produce a pilot of what a Little Pim video would look like, convinced that if people could see what I saw in my head, they would understand its potential to teach and entertain. Through contacts in the film and video world from my film-producing days, I found a freelance producer to manage the project for a small fee. My mother, who had once had her own small documentary company, volunteered to help. We put together a crew, recruited mothers and their kids to be in the pilot, and filmed in Emmett’s preschool and in my lawyer and friend Dominiqu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. How I Got Off the Entrepreneur’s Hamster Wheel
• 2. Powerful and Prepared, Not Pretty and Perfect
• 3. Identify Your Allies, Your Foes, and Your Frenemies
• 4. Be Like Notre Dame, Not the Eiffel Tower
• 5. Turn Moxie into Money
• 6. Slip into Something More Comfortable: Intentional Networking
• 7. Delegate Your Way to the Top
• 8. Putting the Person Back in Your Personal Life
• Conclusion: Women in Motion Stay in Motion
• Acknowledgments
• Thank You
• Million Dollar Women Exercises
• Online Resources
• Glossary
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Copyright