Never a Lack of Ideas

I'm Going Wild! In my last post , I wrote about five lessons I learned from starting my own business, hoping someone might learn something from my experiences. In this post, I will describe what I learned about myself throughout this process — not to toot my own horn, but to hopefully inspire someone to start her own business as a result. I became a good salesman. I have never given myself credit for being good at sales. But what I've learned is that sales is an extension of marketing — or the other way around, depending on who you ask. Good salespeople know the needs of their customers and deliver a solution that satisfies those needs. Identifying the customer was my first challenge: distributors, retail stores, and end consumers all have different goals and the sales pitch to each party is vastly different. As a one-man operation, I was forced to become a great salesman, and if you start your own company, you will be, too. I perfected my elevator pitch. Related to #1 an...

A Walk on the Wild Side In 2007, I designed a rummy-based card game called What’s Wild?! . I produced several thousand copies of the games and created a company to sell it. I did everything on my own— from testing different versions of the game, filing trademarks, outsourcing its production, generating PR, building a web presence, shooting a commercial, and selling to distributors, stores, and direct to customers. It was the biggest learning experience of my professional career — more so than any other job and any level of education I’ve had. The past five years have had plenty of ups and downs and I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. My next post will be on things I now do really well because of this experience. Focus on what you do best. I’m a marketer, through and through. I’m not a lawyer or an accountant. When I decided to produce and sell What’s Wild?! all by myself, I significantly underestimated the time I would spend on things other than ...