My name is Evan Carmichael and I believe that the fastest and most effective way to build a business is to model the strategies of people who have already done what you’re trying to do. I call it Modeling the Masters. My last post with over 30 comments was 3 Success Tips from Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines).

Today we're going to look at how a Vietnam veteran failed with two separate businesses but was determined to become a successful entrepreneur and not have to work for someone else. He would eventually become one of the most successful business writers of all time. This is the story of Rich Dad Poor Dad creator Robert Kiyosaki and the top 3 lessons that you can learn from his success.

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"The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way." - Robert Kiyosaki

Robert Kiyosaki (born April 8, 1947) is an American investor, businessman, self-help author, motivational speaker, and financial literacy activist best known for his "Rich Dad Poor Dad" book series. After serving in the Marine Corps as a helicopter gunship pilot during the Vietnam War, Kiyosaki returned home to work as a salesman for Xerox. Not wanting to work for someone else for the rest of his life, Kiyosaki had dreams of starting his own business.

After unsuccessful stints selling Velcro wallets and T-shirts for heavy metal rock bands, Kiyosaki began promoting the personal growth seminars of Marshall Thurber called "Money & You." When Thurber decided to retire, Kiyosaki took over the business and began traveling the world to educate people about financial strategies. To reach more people he decided to write his first book which he self-published, "Rich Dad Poor Dad."

Robert Kiyosaki has written over 15 books and has sold over 26 million copies. 3 of his books have been on the best sellers lists of The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times simultaneously and he's a sought after speaker who continues to educate people on how to understand their money.

Action Item #1: Make Your Money Work Hard

One bit of advice that has served me well with my business is: Don't spend money until you're making it. Anybody can spend money. If I gave you a million dollars today for your business I'm sure you could come up with a million different ways to spend it. But not everyone can make money. Bootstrapping should be your mantra. Find ways to get your product or service out without spending money. Get even just a few orders and prove that people will buy what you're selling. Then spend money on expanding your marketing. Your money will be well invested because you know you have something that works. Until you start making some sales, hustle and put your sweat into drumming up some business.

Kiyosaki believes that people go to school to learn how to work hard for money while he tries to teach people how to have money work hard for them. He believes that for many people, success is working hard to land a secure job at a big company or government who will look after you until you retire. That model might have worked in the Industrial Age but now in the Information Age, people have to look after their own financial security because you can no longer rely on your employer to take care of you. One of the best ways of doing this, he believes, is to create your own business and become your own boss.

According to Kiyosaki: "The poor and middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them. The rich buy or create assets that work for them so they don't have to... An asset puts money in your pocket and a liability takes money from your pocket. The rich understand the difference and buy assets, not liabilities. "

Action Item #2: Mind Your Own Business

As entrepreneurs we have to wear many hats. You're everything from the CEO to the janitor when you start a business. If you want to grow your business properly and have confidence in your decision making, you need to understand your numbers. Yes, it may be boring and outside your core competencies at the beginning but when you can understand your balance sheet, income statement, and the numbers that run your business you'll be in a much better position to drive your company forward. It could be one of the best investments that you make into yourself and your business.

If you want to achieve financial freedom, Kiyosaki believes that there are 3 key lessons that you need to master: learn how to make money, learn how to manage it, and learn how to invest it. He encourages people to keep their day jobs until they are earning enough money on the side from their own business or investments to be able to quit. Kiyosaki also believes that money is a "base subject" and that it's never too late to start learning.

According to Kiyosaki: "Many people confuse their profession with their business. To become financially secure people need to mind their own business. Your business revolves around your asset column, as opposed to your income column. The rich focus on their asset columns while the poor and middle class focus on their income columns.”

Action Item #3: Work to Learn, Not for Money

If you haven't started your business yet, a great piece of advice is to get a job where you can learn the skills that you need to succeed as an entrepreneur. Want to set up your own auto shop? Go work for small auto shop. Learn the ins and outs of how the business runs. Ask the business owner to get involved in other projects in addition to what you were hired to do. Work extra hours and on the weekends to over deliver and really understand how the business works. You'll first figure out if that industry is for you or not and you'll also make many of your rookie mistakes while still getting paid by someone else.

Kiyosaki credits much of his success as an entrepreneur to his military education. He learned how to lead men into battle, make important decisions quickly, and be tough. He translated those skills into hiring excellent workers and leading them into business battles. He also credits working for Xerox for teaching him how to sell and how to accept and move forward from rejection.

According to Kiyosaki: "Many entrepreneurs fail to grow because they lack leadership skills. And rather than look in the mirror, they find it easier to blame others. Blame is short for be-lame, and you can’t be an effective leader if you’re lame... Work to learn. Don’t work for money… Look for jobs that can help you develop the skills of managing cash flow, systems and people rather than just pay you well."

True Story

There was once a friend of Kiyosaki’s whose 16 year old son desperately wanted a new car. His friends had all been given one by their parents, and now this son expected nothing less. But, it was not going to be that easy for the boy. His father had played Kiyosaki’s CASHFLOW board game and he wanted to teach his son a lesson in financial management. The father gave his son $3,000 but forbade him from using it to buy a car just yet. At the same time, he gave his son a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. The father told his son that only once he had earned an additional $6,000 from investments could he then use $3,000 to buy a car. The rest of the money would of course go into his college fund. “My friend said it was the best $3,000 he ever spent,” says Kiyosaki. “Not only had his son gained a new respect for the power of money, he also learned to spend money wisely instead of letting money burn holes in his pockets.”

More Quotes

"Don’t work for money; make it work for you."

"Remember, your mind is your greatest asset, so be careful what you put into it."

" If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there."

What Do You Think?

Did you bootstrap your business? Do you understand the numbers that run your company? What part of Robert Kiyosaki's message impacted you the most? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Evan Carmichael

To learn more check out my list of Robert Kiyosaki articles or my website, EvanCarmichael.com.

TELUS Talks Business correspondent Julie Bishop recently interviewed Tony Lourakis, the CEO of Complete Innovations, a leading global provider of mission critical fleet, asset and mobile workforce management solutions. The Markham Ontario headquartered company continues to win awards year after year being recognized for its national growth with honours including a spot on IDC Canada’s “10 to Watch” list, being ranked as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies by PROFIT 100 three years in a row, and being part of Deloitte’s Fast 500 List in 2010.

Last week, Tony discussed financing, building a customer base and the importance of customer feedback.  In this post, Tony looks to the future and talks to his goals for 2012.

What advice would you offer a start up based on your experience?

For a start up, one of the most important things is managing cash flow. Start ups need to move from a money burn situation to a money making situation as quickly as possible. Ensure you have a well thought out plan on how to do that, and identifies the tipping point and work backwards from there and make sure you execute on the plan.

So it’s getting to that financial stability as quickly as you can because, once you get there, it breeds more opportunity and success and it gives you the strength to do just so much more. That’s how you can really scale a business.

What would you say your greatest business success in 2011 has been?

Our greatest business success in 2011 has been launching our products with AT&T in the US in a similar way to how TELUS has been reselling our products for about five years now in Canada.

We launched in June of 2011 with AT&T. The launch was about three years in the making from quoting them initially, to getting our foot in the door, to working various levels of management, to being accepted and brought in.

The way AT&T operates is that they bring you in on kind of a tier initially where you’re not on their bill and they don’t resell your product.  It’s more of a co-sell type relation where you have to prove yourself. If the relationship is successful in this phase then they may start reselling your product.

Very few companies have achieved this point and doing so has been a big accomplishment for us. So 2012 for us is all about ramping up this opportunity to its full potential.

What are your other goals for 2012?

Some other key focuses are to stay focused on our partnership with TELUS in Canada and continue to grow that business. Our business with TELUS has been immensely successful for us and it still represents our biggest business. In fact, it has been a key driver in our success and growth.

Another important goal in 2012 is that we are working to launch our fourth generation product with Courier and Fleet Complete, which are going to be merged together into one platform. I think it’s going to be a game changer so we're looking over it to making that launch in 2012.

How do you keep your team motivated and focused on your business goals?

First off, we try to keep our goals very simple, something you can easily remember so when the teams come in everyday, they know exactly what they're working towards.

We have team goals or departmental goals and for instance, our Canadian sales team has a goal and it’s to hit a certain number of volume or subscribers we're adding for the year. Our customer service department has goals around key metrics like how fast we answer the call, how quickly close support tickets etc. Our R&D team has goals around product release timelines and quality levels.

Every week we measure our results against our targets on a week-to-week basis so we know in real time if we are trending on track, ahead or trending below our goals. And we do that with each department.

Our corporate goals are also simply stated. For instance, it might be as simple as to say here's our revenue goal for this year and here's our market goal in terms of market penetration or strategic thing that we want to do.

We remind people of these goals at every opportunity. We have a couple of company meetings a year, I do a video message every month to keep people up to date on how we're performing against these goals.

We also work to create that team feeling where we're out there competing and we want to win and we want to beat the competition much like a sports team.

And then we have other initiatives like, for example, we give back. Every year we donate some of our profits to charities. I think that helps the team see that the company isn’t just about growth earnings. Obviously there are bonuses tied to our business goals, but we're also doing something good for the community.

Is there any other advice you wanted to offer to SMBs looking to grow their  businesses?

The only other thing I would offer is to always be innovative.  I find some entrepreneurs get bored of their business sectors, as entrepreneurs by nature like creating and once something is running smoothly, they start to loose interest with it. I think that as the business leader you have the power and ability to innovate and transform it to expand into new markets and offerings and services and products.

So always be thinking about the possibilities of the future and innovation because there aren’t any limits. The opportunities are endless.

This is the fifth post in a series featuring candid thoughts from leaders at enterprise-sized companies on how their organizations are harnessing the power of social media.

Darin Diehl is associate vice president of Sun Life Canada Web. His role is to use social media channels to manage the Sun Life financial brand by empowering Canadians with financial tips and tools via content-driven sites like BrighterLife.ca and SimplementBrillant.ca.

1. Social media has grown exponentially in a very short space of time, yet many businesses remain unsure how to optimize social media. Has your company invested resources in social media as a communications tool, or are you waiting for a more robust success model?

Diehl: We’ve begun to invest in social media with a lot of foundational work. Some of that is understanding what our social media strategy is. Some companies stumble into social media with a checklist: do we have a Facebook and LinkedIn account, are we tweeting about things? We try to take a more measured and strategic approach. So we have a number of initiatives around different business goals in the social media area. After all, we provide a broad range of financial services and products. It’s beyond insurance. We have 3500 financial advisors. So when doing social media, we ask what we’re trying to attain?

2. What specific resources have you allocated to social media?

Diehl:  We have a social media team at Sun Life, with a director-level leader. There are certain advantages in that the in-house team understands the business. And it gives you a level of protection, because those people over time develop awareness and understanding of our social media corporate culture and how we want to proceed strategically and cautiously, and still be innovative and bold.

3. Are they primarily in-house or are you using agencies?

Diehl: We are partnering with key agencies and outside vendors to help us with certain strategies, or who provide us with services and tools to help measure and execute what we do in social media with different target audiences. The consumer is one; employers and sponsors of pension and benefit plans represent another target audience. Or there are third party advisors that distribute the product. So we have different audiences and different strategies to pursue.

4. What research tools have you used to understand how your customers use social media to identify/buy your products or services?

Diehl: We use social media monitoring tools to track traffic to and from our social properties. From a research perspective, we look at how social media applies to financial services and insurance companies. Some of that research comes from Forrester or McKinsey. This is one thing that might surprise people in other verticals. Social media at this level of business is being researched and studied and there’s vendors and tools available to us that

are really geared to financial services. An example is Sysomos, a tool that can monitor and take the pulse of social communities to track what they’re talking about. There may be discussions we might want to tap into to become strategically part of the conversation and possibly influence it. And there are tools to monitor the mention of your brand, so you can keep track of how it is discussed socially.

5. Did social media play a role in growing your business in the last 12 months, and if so, how?

Diehl: Social media for us is a long-term play. It’s not just about growing the business. It’s managing our brand reputation, it’s connecting with our customers. But there is an element of bringing people down the path to purchase toward potential products and services we offer. The main example is a new web portal BrighterLife.ca, enabled by social media brand extensions. The site, and its sister French language Quebec site, SimplementBrillant.ca, focus on consumers by delivering engaging, plain-language content around topics that they intersect with on a daily basis. We’ve got a constant publishing model. The content is tweeted on a Twitter channel, and we post on our BrighterLife Facebook page. We also have a YouTube extension, and we have a plan to reach out and connect with influential bloggers in major categories. And we’re not on that property writing about our products and services. We’re writing about the challenges that consumers face. But we provide them with calls to action, with the next step being linking you to a fully branded extension site like SunLife.ca, or My Retirement Café’, or connecting you with a tool to help you find a Sun Life advisor.

6. How do you measure the return on investment for your social media activities?

Diehl: Metrics is absolutely vital if you’re going to do this. It just can’t be about proceeding down a path where, yes, we have a LinkedIn page, and we have a Twitter account on this. There has to be metrics around the social media. We will be measuring not just to confirm that’s it’s benefiting the way we want, but to instruct us on how to adjust our social media strategy. We’ll be measuring everything we do.

7. How do you measure the success or failure of your social media strategy?

Diehl: Some of it is longer term. It’s not something we’re measuring to determine success or failure on a quarterly basis. It’s more we make adjustments to our plans based on the metrics. In terms of how to judge success or failure, we ask are we moving the needle in terms of lead generation, for example. We can measure that and we can see whether we’re getting the benefits. We can measure whether the social media efforts we’re making are positively affecting the brand by measuring unaided brand awareness or aided brand awareness in survey questions. There’s a host of other in-bound metrics that can measure success or failure.

8. Specific to your social media activities, based on what you learned in 2011, what will you do differently in 2012 and what will you do the same?

Diehl: We will continue to have a strategic approach to social media, to be bold, but cautious, to be purposeful in the initiatives we take. As far as what we would do differently, that will again be about measuring what we’re doing, studying the results and learning and adjusting. But we won’t stop doing social media. It will be more about how to get better at it and get better results.

9. What is your New Year’s resolution for social media in your place of business?

Diehl: The resolution would be again not to barge down the path of social media initiatives without being purposeful about it, without being thoughtful about what we’re trying to achieve. We haven’t done that up until now and I’d resolve to keep that balance going forward. On the other hand, I’d also resolve not to be dismissive outright at ideas that initially may not apply to the financial services vertical. That over-caution could be a bigger risk than not taking a look at something that looks a bit bold at first, and then not taking any action on it.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based business reporter. twitter.com/etanvlessing

TELUS Talks Business correspondent Julie Bishop recently interviewed Tony Lourakis, the CEO of Complete Innovations, a leading global provider of mission critical fleet, asset and mobile workforce management solutions. The Markham Ontario headquartered company continues to win awards year after year being recognized for its national growth with honours including a spot on IDC Canada’s “10 to Watch” list, being ranked as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies by PROFIT 100 three years in a row, and being part of Deloitte’s Fast 500 List in 2010. 

Last week, Tony talked about his company's success and overcoming challenges.  In this post, Tony discusses financing, building a customer base and the importance of customer feedback.

How has Complete Innovations arranged its financing? 

This is a very important topic for business people and entrepreneurs. Our strategy is traditional - we bootstrapped the company.  We didn’t go out and raise any money or take out any debt. We built the product using our time without getting paid for it.

And once we had the product, we started selling it right away using very low cost methods such as building a website.  When we started making money, we invested all of it back into the company to fund our growth.

It’s a hard way to do it, but it keeps you disciplined and it makes you think about margin and profitability because, at the end of the day, you have to make profit doing what you do otherwise it’s not a sustainable business.

Having said that, there are times where we do get financing for cash flow reasons.  And we've been able to do that using traditional bank operating lines against receivables or assets.

Often businesses struggle with building their customer base and attracting new customers with limited funds and resources that you discussed.  What's your advice to those businesses?

It’s difficult, but I believe there's always a way. The way I did it was to identify who the influential customers were in our industry and build relationships with them.

In every industry there are those few customers that are very well known within the industry.  They're very well connected, they're respected, they're influential.  Maybe they're part of the association for the industry the company goes after.

When I started, I identified the movers and shakers within the industry and sought them out using low cost methods such calling them, meeting with them, trying to befriend them and trying to get them on my side then eventually doing business with them.

And when you get that opportunity, you’ve got to turn that influential industry person into a cheerleader who is willing to talk about how your company has helped them. This testimonial will in turn help you secure the business of other companies.

That’s the lowest cost marketing, but it’s one of the most effective ways of marketing especially if you're a B2B business.

How does customer feedback impact your business?

Customer feedback is very important to us. It’s a major contributor to our success and our product richness. One of my goals is to be very in touch with our customers and to visit with them often and see their operations to get a sense of how they operate, what they're doing and what their needs are. 
I attend a lot of conferences, trade conferences and association meetings to talk to the people in the industry and get feedback from customers.

Every part of our business has to contribute to this. Our frontline people talks to our customers everyday when they're calling in for support or issues.  This is a great source of information to try to understand if there are any trends or themes or issues in our product that we can improve.

We also do surveys of our customer base.  Recently we're doing a lot on the social media side such as supporting LinkedIn pages and discussion groups for our company and our products to engage with customers.

We research our competitors a lot, we research the market and we look outside of our market.  We look at what's going on in other industries and in technology in general and try to bring some innovative ideas into our space.

In next weeks' Entrepreneur straight talk  series, Tony shares his advice to other entrepreneurs and goals for 2012.

TELUS business kicked off the first of their Challenge event series yesterday with an exclusive breakfast event at TELUS House in Toronto.

The year-long event series follows in the footsteps of TELUS’ national ‘customer first’ campaign, and focused on supporting small businesses with common business challenges.  This months’ theme addressed the question: how can my business be more productive with our existing resources?

The session opened with seasoned tech journalist and regular contributor to TELUS talks business, Marc Saltzman who showcased 7 hot business productivity apps including Evernote, a popular download among the business crowd, touting 20 million users, according to Gigaom.

Photo: Tech journalist & guest blogger on TELUS talks business, Marc Saltzman

“The type of apps you choose to help you be more productive in your business really depends on what kind of business you’re in,” said Saltzman.  “For instance, I’m a tech journalist, so I rely heavily on word processing documents in my tablets and smartphones and I need a powerful calendar”.

Photo: Les Base, Director of Business Development for Advertek

TELUS customer Les Base of Advertek, an integrated print production company, spoke next and  focused on how the print business has evolved and the implications it’s had on their business doing more with existing resources.

“What once took three weeks now takes three hours.  We’re achieving our objectives and meeting requirements with the help of our digital workflow,” said Les.

One of the ways in which they are able to do more was by working with the right partners to help them focus on their customers.  “One of the main reasons we moved over to TELUS was not just because of the savings (about 20% per month) but because TELUS has been great to work with, they made it easy for us to switch over.”

Piero Fusco, director of sales for TELUS closed the event on a high note with the announcement that TELUS will once again be sponsoring “The Challenge” contest launching this March.  Supported by The Globe & Mail, "The Challenge" gives small business owners the chance to win a $100,000 small business grant.

“Every day we have to make decisions around business challenges,” Fusco says.  “The challenge series is designed to help you address those challenges and share knowledge more broadly with the chance to win $100,000 to help your business grow”.

For more information on the TELUS challenge, visit www.globeandmail.com/thechallenge.  You can follow the challenge series on twitter using hashtag: #TELUSchallenge.

This is the fourth post in a series featuring candid thoughts from leaders at enterprise-sized companies on how their organizations are harnessing the power of social media.

Tim Husband is the Digital Marketing Manager at Cisco Canada, responsible for the B2B giant’s social media branding. Husband tells TELUS Talks Business about why Cisco Canada uses social media within a wider marketing strategy to connect with customers and business partners.

1. Social media has grown exponentially in a very short space of time, yet many businesses remain unsure how to optimize social media. Has your company invested resources in social media as a communications tool, or are you waiting for a more robust success model?

Husband: Cisco Canada has invested in social media because we see fantastic opportunities to drive brand awareness and engage in conversations with our customers and partners. We’ve moved forward quickly on social media because we realize it’s the future for how businesses interact with their customers, and it’s good for our corporate culture and recruiting efforts. In fact, recent survey results from our 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology report suggests more than half of college students, if they encountered a company that banned access to social media, would either not accept the job or would circumvent the policy. We think that speaks volumes to the power of these tools.

2. What specific resources have you allocated to social media?

Husband: We have a dedicated team in place to manage content and community management for our corporate social media channels, and that’s on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Slideshare and Flicker. The team is integrated with our public relations and marketing team to best use and leverage content from all sources. And we also work closely with our global social media teams in the United States to leverage best practices and understand their successes and learnings.

What’s really important for us in Canada is that we’re driving Canadian relevant content. We do work with the U.S on the best practices. But we don’t want to replicate the U.S. content in Canada. It’s important that we’re putting out content that’s relevant to Canadians, and engaging in conversations where Canadians want to have those conversations. And that’s something we’re driving on our blog, not replicating the U.S. blog content.

We’re offering what matters to our customers in Canada and what matters to our partners. And where possible, we put a Canadian angle on the global content we share.

3. Are they primarily in-house or are you using agencies?

Husband: We coach the whole organization to engage in social media. Really, that starts with our executive leadership team, to include them in as many ways as possible. Cisco established a social media governance policy, and we provide ongoing social media training to our employees. Our governance policy really gives the direction for how our social media should be used in the organization. Anyone active on social media, or looking to get active, we strongly encourage that they review the governance policy, which is publicly available on our Slideshare account. Also, everyone in the organization is at different stages with social media. Some are at an early stage, or haven’t started yet. They require very different training than someone who is already very active on social media and very savvy.

4. What research tools have you used to understand how your customers use social media to identify/buy your products or services?

Husband: Listening is fundamental to building success to social media. We utilize Radian6 as our main listening platform and SimplyMeasured for audience profiling. We’re listening to all conversations around Cisco, around our product. We listen to competitors’ conversations as well, so that we can understand and build market intelligence. And we engage in conversations where necessary. We build brand awareness and we drive engagement online.

5. Did social media play a role in growing your business in the last 12 months, and if so, how?

Husband: Social media contributed to building brand awareness and increasing engagement with our customers and partners in 2011. We’ve been able to successfully integrate social media into our event planning and now consult with our social media team ahead of significant events and brand opportunities. I’m really been thrilled with our success in the last 12 months as we continue to build momentum around our social presence. As an example, we recently leveraged social media for our Cisco Plus Road Show held in four Canadian cities. We engaged in conversations ahead of the event, during the event, and after the event. These events are just one day road shows in different cities, and people come and they go. But we want to bring them into our community and have ongoing conversations with them. At the road show, we saw attendees beginning to have conversations with one another, because we had a hash-tag we created.

6. How do you measure the return on investment for your social media activities?

Husband: The true value of social media is in the communities we build and the engagement and awareness we drive out of these communities. Our social engagement also offers a valuable resource for rich and relevant content. In fact, research from Cisco highlights how 20% of IT buyers find manufacturers blogs very useful as an information source. Interestingly, websites today are considered mandatory, and yet very few people question the return on investment of a website. Yet we question the ROI on social media. A website is a core part of the business. A website has product information. It serves to manage in-bound inquiries. You have a contact form on your website.

Social media is no different. We can share product information on our blogs, and we can take it one step further and make it interactive with video through our social channels. Also, social media is a fantastic way to converse with an organization and allow in-bound enquiries.

7. How do you measure the success or failure of your social media strategy?

Husband: Social media success is not simply a measure of the total number of fans, likes or followers. Success is based on loyalty, positive interactions, volume of engagements and sales opportunities identified and partnerships formed. That’s how we measure the success of our strategy.

8. Specific to your social media activities, based on what you learned in 2011, what will you do differently in 2012 and what will you do the same?

Husband: We forged a strong path in 2011 and will continue this in 2012.

It’s important as an organization not to become complacent on social media and we will remain focused on building communities and fostering engagement through new tools, platforms and content. Wherever possible, we try to be innovate. There will be many new things that we will try in 2012.

9. What is your New Year’s resolution for social media in your place of business?

Husband: It would be to deliver social media value to sales. This requires active listening and the ability for the team to uncover market intelligence and sales opportunities within the communities.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based business reporter. twitter.com/etanvlessing

My name is Evan Carmichael and I believe that the fastest and most effective way to build a business is to model the strategies of people who have already done what you’re trying to do. I call it Modeling the Masters. My last post with over 25 was 3 Success Tips from Anita Roddick (The Body Shop).

Today we're going to look at how a young lawyer who seemingly had it all bravely left his job to start his own business. He had to fight over 30 lawsuits and nearly went out of business but he stuck with it and created one of the most respected companies in America. This is the story of Southwest Airlines co-founder Herb Kelleher and the top 3 lessons that you can learn from his success.

Must Watch Video

"Your people come first, and if you treat them right, they'll treat the customers right." - Herb Kelleher

Herb Kelleher (born March 12, 1931) is the co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines. After graduating from law school he did what every new lawyer dreamed of. He clerked for the Supreme Court Justice, joined a law firm, and became partner at a firm in his wife's home state of Texas. He should have been on top of the world but he was instead itching for a new career as an entrepreneur. One evening Kelleher was having drinks with a client, Rollin King, and that night the two used a cocktail napkin to hatch a new business, Southwest Airlines.

Using Kelleher's legal experience and King's business background, Southwest Airlines was set up to run only in Texas to avoid having to follow federal price regulations. Kelleher had found a legal loophole and his competition didn't appreciate it. Kelleher had to fight off over 30 lawsuits before Southwest Airlines was even able to get a plane in the air. But they prevailed and bootstrapped their way from a company with only 4 planes to being one of the most admired companies in America.

Southwest is consistently named one of the top five Most Admired Corporations in America by Fortune magazine, which also called Kelleher perhaps the best CEO in America. It has never experienced an in-flight fatality and continues to enjoy growing success. Southwest is also the only airline to have over 30 consecutive years of profit, despite the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which threatened the rest of the industry. In 2001, Kelleher resigned as CEO and president of Southwest due to a personal battle with prostate cancer.

Action Item #1: Put Your People First

Any successful entrepreneur will tell you how important it is to have a good team running your business. Employees who are skilled at what they do and love their work will take you places you might only dream about right now. Treat them as people, give them opportunities, show them how they are adding value, and give them something to believe in and your business growth will explode.

Kelleher believed in the power of having employees who loved working for his company. He paid attention to their needs and made them feel important. He also made everyone have a share in the business' success. Southwest implemented the first profit-sharing plan in the airline industry in 1974. Employees owned 13 percent of the company’s common stock. All of Southwest’s employees, from the janitors to the pilots, receive stock options.

According to Kelleher: “I always felt that our people came first. Some of the business schools regarded that as a conundrum. They would say: Which comes first, your people, your customers, or your shareholders? And I would say, it's not a conundrum. Your people come first, and if you treat them right, they'll treat the customers right, and the customers will come back, and that'll make the shareholders happy... We’ve always tried to be sensitive to the needs of our people and recognize the things that are important to them in their personal lives... At Southwest Airlines, you can’t have a baby without being recognized – getting communication from the general office. You can't have a death in your family without hearing from us. If you're out with a serious illness, we're in touch with you once every two weeks to see how you're doing. We have people who have been retired for 10 years, and we keep in touch with them. We want them to know that we value them as individuals, not just as workers. So that's part of the esprit de corps... If you come here, you'll be happy.”

Action Item #2: Focus Everyone on Customer Service

Customer service is increasingly becoming one of the most important differentiating factors for companies. For a lot of businesses there really isn't all that much that is different in the products or services that they are offering compared to their competition. How do you stand out? Wow your customers with service. Make them love doing business with you so they come back and tell their friends. Have everyone on your team be as supportive as they can towards your customers and your marketing strategy will take care of itself.

At Southwest, people are encouraged to go the extra mile, and then some, to help their customers. There is the man who had a heart attack at the airport, who was then accompanied by a Southwest employee to the hospital. The employee stayed with the man all night and called his wife to update her on his status. Then, there is the passenger who left the airport only to find a flat tire on his car. Moments later, a Southwest employee was changing it for him, despite the fact that the man informed him he had never flown with Southwest.

According to Kelleher: "We have the best customer satisfaction record, based on Transportation Dept. statistics, of any airline in America, the fewest complaints filed per 100,000 passengers carried. So you’re not just getting low fares, you’re also getting wonderful customer service... We have a People Dept. That’s what it deals with, so don’t call it Human Resources – that sounds like something from a Stalin five-year plan. You know, how much coal you can mine. We say everybody is a leader, no matter what your job is. We want you to focus on customer service - and not just to the outside world - customer service to the inside world. If [employees] pollute our other people internally and they in turn savage the people who are doing the work outside, the whole company has just rotted."

Action Item #3: Hire the Right People

If you're going to have a company that puts its people first and grows through repeat customers and referrals you're going to have to do a fantastic job in hiring the right people. Know what type of personality you need in new hires and don't settle until you've found the best person for the job. Once you say you're going to settle for less than the best, that's what happens to your entire business.

In the hiring process at Southwest, many applicants are made to take personality tests. In one example, the vice president of Southwest’s People Department was having difficulty finding a new ramp agent. Frustrated, she went to Kelleher to ask for advice. She said she was embarrassed that she had already interviewed 34 candidates for the position. Kelleher told her to interview 134 people if that was what it would take to find the person with the right attitude for the job.

According to Kelleher: "We have a good many MBAs, but we look at them for attitude as well. We will hire someone with less experience, less education, and less expertise, than someone who has more of those things and has a rotten attitude because we can train people. We can teach people how to lead. We can teach people how to provide customer service. But we can’t change their DNA." One day, Kelleher received a letter from one of Southwest’s ramp agents in Oklahoma. It read, “Herb, I’m on to what you’re doing…You’re making work fun – and home work.”

True Story

In the beginning, Southwest had just four planes and 70 employees. All of the legal battles had left the company on the verge of closing down. It forced Kelleher to make a difficult decision: he had to either sell one of the planes or lay off some of his employees. He chose to sell the plane. In return, Kelleher asked his employees to cut gate turnaround times from 55 to just 15 minutes. They pulled it off and Kelleher had clearly set the culture for his business.

More Quotes

"I learned it by doing it, and I was scared to death."

"Sometimes you need a little courage too just to buck popular opinion."

"The important thing is to take the bricklayer and make him understand that he’s building a home, not just laying bricks."

What Do You Think?

What have you done to put your people first? How have you gone out of your way to help your customers? What part of Herb Kelleher's message impacted you the most? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Evan Carmichael

To learn more check out my list of Herb Kelleher articles or my website, EvanCarmichael.com.

TELUS Talks Business correspondent Julie Bishop recently interviewed Tony Lourakis, the CEO of Complete Innovations, a leading global provider of mission critical fleet, asset and mobile workforce management solutions. The Markham Ontario headquartered company continues to win awards year after year being recognized for its national growth with honours including a spot on IDC Canada’s “10 to Watch” list, being ranked as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies by PROFIT 100 three years in a row, and being part of Deloitte’s Fast 500 List in 2010. 

In this post, Tony discusses his company's success and overcoming challenges.

What specific challenges does Complete Innovations address for its clients?

Complete Innovations helps companies that have a mobile workforce optimize their operations, create efficiencies, reduce costs, improve scalability and reduce risk.

We do this through our products and services, so companies go from not having visibility into where their mobile workforce is or what they're doing in a real time basis to having full visibility into the job status and exactly where their team, assets and vehicles are.

We have thousands of customers and they cover a wide array of industries, but all of them have the need to improve their efficiency in the field and that’s what we do. For instance, one of our customers is a bottled water company, which delivers across Canada and has a fleet of about 500 vehicles.

They had a policy not to idle on deliveries, but they never knew if people were complying with unless the supervisor drove around and followed the vehicles.
After they installed our Fleet Complete tracking product, which TELUS sold to them, they could monitor not only the location of their vehicles but also speeding, idling, hard braking, rapid acceleration and hard cornering.  But the key one here, in this case, was idling.  The technology was able to confirm that in most cases, drivers were idling on delivery.

The company then informed its drivers that they were being monitored for idling and reminded them of the no-idling policy. They quickly got full compliance on the policy, leading a savings of more than $100 per vehicle per month in fuel alone, just from implementing that one benefit. The system cost them $50 vehicle per month so their ROI was immediate and huge especially when you multiply that across a fleet of 400 or 500 vehicles.

Another example is of a courier company in Vancouver that recently implemented our system to replace paper waybills. The company’s waybill system was costing them about $50,000 per year as each waybill was a three-part carbon copy form.

Using our Courier Complete product, which features a mobile application for smart phones, enabled them to make their whole workflow paperless so the drivers could get all their delivery data on the mobile device.

When they do a pickup they can scan the packages.  When they go do a delivery, they hand the device to the customer and the customer signs off on it electronically. It’s eliminated the need for them to print waybills, and just that one thing has saved them more than $50,000 a year.

Additional benefits include many other savings from productivity gains and visibility, the ability to get data in real time, and environmental benefits such as reduced paper waste.

What are a couple of challenges you faced as a business and for which you could recommend resources to for other entrepreneurs?

First, it’s important to have a very sound business model to begin with. You need to spend a lot of time thinking about the business model and making sure there's a very strong value proposition in the market you're going after.

If you’ve thought all that through and have a sound business plan then when you execute your plan make sure you stick to your plan. Of course, plans change and things change, but when you start from a solid plan, you can have a better understanding of what can change and in which directions you should go.

Second, hiring and retaining top talents is a key.  Find people who are excited about what you're trying to do and are prepared to put in the blood, sweat and tears to see it through. Be sure to hire the best people you possibly can because you're only going to be as great as your people.

In next weeks' Entrepreneur straight talk series, Tony addresses financing, building a customer base and the importance of customer feedback.

This is the third post in a series featuring candid thoughts from leaders at enterprise-sized companies on how their organizations are harnessing the power of social media.

Todd Boone is director of market development at Psion Teklogix Inc., a global designer and maker of mobile computers. Boone is charged with enabling Psion to use social media to engage business partners and customers, and as an open network to drive innovation and external collaboration.

1. Social media has grown exponentially in a very short space of time, yet many businesses remain unsure how to optimize social media. Has your company invested resources in social media as a communications tool, or are you waiting for a more robust success model?

Boone: First and primarily, we’ve put in a community or I should say a social media platform which is intelligent and helps power a Psion-focused community. That enables us to get our employees engaged with our customers, as well as our partners, to discuss issues about the company and about potential opportunities and technologies. We see social media as integrated into the fabric of the business, because one of the key elements of our strategy going forward is to pursue an open hardware model. And one of the enablers of that model is social media. The community we’ve created is a primary vehicle to have that discussion with the community at large. And then, on top of that, we use other media such as Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook to get the message out there. But in most cases, we’re focused on bringing the conversation back to our community so we can have it focus on our infrastructure.

2. What specific resources have you allocated to social media?

Boone: There are really only a couple people in the organization. One of them is tasked with overseeing social media as part of their PR responsibility. But we have enabled the entire organization to get involved. Two years ago, social media like Facebook and Twitter was blocked on company premises. Then we decided to open the company up to social media to give employees full and complete access. And a topic that always came up was how to monitor the conversation on social media. What we found was, when all employees have access and are engaged, and everyone is responsible to some extent for the conversations going on about Psion, it actually makes that ongoing monitoring easier because people naturally jump into the conversation where they’re comfortable. The other adjustment we made is the help desk now treats social media as just another tool. And because it’s public and open access, we’ve seen a reduction in the number of calls coming into the help desk by around 10%. The information is now public and searchable and people can help themselves without needing to pick up the phone.

3. Are they primarily in-house or are you using agencies?

Boone: We are almost exclusively in-house. The only support we have is for the platform itself from a technology perspective. We don’t have any agency support from a content perspective because we want to build trust with the market. That means being as transparent and open with people as we can be. That has an impact on purchase decisions, and how people perceive us before they issue that first equipment order. If we start putting things in a very refined manner, it feels scripted and doctored by an agency. We want real people and real things. Even our CEO writes his own blog, and there are typos in it. At first he was worried about that. But my feeling is that makes it valid and real.

4. What research tools have you used to understand how your customers use social media to identify/buy your products or services?

Boone: We’re a B2B organization. We haven’t done that much research. I can see in a consumer-focused organization, research is key. For us, we haven’t done a lot of research on the specific issue of people buying based on the social media aspect of what we do. That said, what we do have is linkages where we track leads into the system. And the next step is attributing that to revenue. But there’s not a lot of third party research.

5. Did social media play a role in growing your business in the last 12 months, and if so, how?

Boone: It’s hard to say, that’s the task underway right now. We now have on the website an ability for our partners to market themselves quite robustly. They get their own page, they control the content. And that allows someone who’s browsing our website to hit the partner and say I want some more information. What we have not created yet is linkage to revenue from people hitting that link and approaching the partner.

6. How do you measure the return on investment for your social media activities?

Boone: There is a revenue aspect. But the second aspect is what we call open source mobility. Think of Lego, where you can construct anything and then you can deconstruct the same pieces to create something new and different. The open source ability allows us to customize. Having designed something in such a way, partners can create and add their own technology to our technology platform. The way we do this is the third element: having a very open and documented capability for development on the devices. The reason we do that is technology is changing dramatically, and is being used in new and different applications. And we can’t do all this ourselves. So our outcomes from social media are different from other companies because we integrate it into the very fabric of our strategy. What we’re looking for is actual product, and new business opportunities that are coming directly out of social media.

7. How do you measure the success or failure of your social media strategy?

Boone: The next step is figuring out new product and new markets and new revenue streams, which is easy to track because it’s inherent in the new platform that we’ve created. And we’ll also know when a partner has made revenue transactions.

8. Specific to your social media activities, based on what you learned in 2011, what will you do differently in 2012 and what will you do the same?

Boone: We’re looking to invest in some monitoring infrastructure so we have better capability than what we’re doing now. It’s really the analytics that are not that good. We want a better picture of actual traffic flows, with a visitor profile of who’s coming in. We’re growing and we’re looking to continue growing the amount of people going into our site for information, but this is where the analytics become so important.

9. What is your New Year’s resolution for social media in your place of business?

Boone: I would say to push social media in a way that’s it’s not so frightening. Let me explain. I think social media is becoming the new norm on the web. People expect interaction, to have a conversation, rather than receive static content. But I still think that, particularly in our organization, we still have an 80/20 rule. There’s 20% who use social media often and 80% who use it sometimes. If we can continue to educate people in such a way that the fear factor of posting their comments online goes down, it can have an impact in terms of leveraging social media in a company like our own for knowledge transfer. So it’s the ability to listen to what’s happening in the marketplace, and have people then share that knowledge.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based business reporter. twitter.com/etanvlessing

Over the last ten years I have talked to hundreds of CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses about what works and what doesn’t in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results.  I started to keep track of what CEOs were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed. 

Last year I developed a list called “The 11 Must-Have’s for Your 2011 Marketing Plan”. I believe that those “Must Have’s” still hold true more than ever, so if you have not read that or delivered on this for your business, you should start here.

This year we would like to build on the list from 2011 and explain the most important tactics we see for 2012. If you deliver them for your business, you will add significant kick to your sales and marketing program.

1. Figure Out Google+.

Google is not going away any time soon and while you might just think it’s another social media site, it’s not. Google+ could have significant value to how you communicate with your customers because it’s a tool that’s been designed for business as opposed to a site that has been developed for socializing, trying to figure out how to work for business (Facebook ). The way you connect and build groups in Google+ and interact, could be an important, cost effective tool for achieving #2 on our list.

2. Stop Broadcasting and Start Engaging.

Just broadcasting information is not going work next year. The fight to get heard is more competitive than ever so you have to figure out how to interact and work with your community whether its customers, people in the industry or people tracking your business progress. You need to understand how to build that community with tools on the back of your website for posting comments or communicating as a group with online meetings, or enhanced podcasts or webinars or shared content. It’s not about quantity, it’s about the group interacting and communicating. Stop broadcasting. Start engaging.

3. Improve your E-mail Marketing Program.

New e-mail legislation coming in April 2012 in Canada means three things:

a. You must have an e-mail marketing tool that clearly allows people to opt out and contact you if they are disgruntled about your emails. You can no longer get away with using Outlook or a CRM system that does not comply with anti-spam laws. It’s no longer an option – it’s the law.

b. People have to agree to receive e-mail from you. Don’t purchase lists. Don’t scrape addresses off websites. If someone has not opted-in to your e-mail program they don’t want to hear from you. This is bad news for people who spam and sell lists. This is great news for people who send valuable content to an Opt-in List. Make your emails valuable and wanted as opposed to deleted and unread.

c. Broadcasting product information will likely force Opt-out quickly. Re-read item #2 above.

4. Use Offline to Drive People Online.

Advertising, trade shows and other forms of marketing that are referred to as offline tactics, all drive people back to your website whether you like it or not. See our post on October 14, 2011 about the 11.2 pieces of data people are looking at online before they make a decision to buy anything and call you. It’s okay if you want to use advertising in the local paper to promote your business but instead of including a phone number, just include the link to a web page and offer something of value people can download to give you their e-mail address (so you can start solving #3 on our list).

5. Look at your Website and Google Analytics Every Day.

There is gold sitting there about what people are looking at and how people are interacting with your company. Just because they have not called you does not mean they are not checking out if they want to do business with you. Use your data to improve your marketing and don’t orphan your website. You should be adjusting content every week.

Maybe these suggestions seem obvious but you would be surprised how many companies ignore the basics. Don’t be one of them. These five strategies alone will add significant kick to your 2012 marketing plan.

Happy kick-starting your 2012 marketing plan!

Marie Wiese is founder of Marketing CoPilot, www.marketingcopilot.com and the author of the eBook, “Why marketing fails... and what you can do about it!” Marketing CoPilot provides outsourced marketing services to business owners that want to create a two-way dialogue with past, current and future customers. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world, past Chair of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region and a workshop leader at Regional Innovation Centres (RICs) in Ontario where she teaches early stage companies how to build online lead generation engines that deliver measurable business results.

This is the second post in a series featuring candid thoughts from leaders at enterprise-sized companies on how their organizations are harnessing the power of social media.

Philippe Meyersohn is general manager, brand at Mabe Canada, the manufacturer and distributor of GE Appliances in Canada. His role is to use social media to develop long-term customer relationships, while recognizing that Twitter or Facebook does little to drive consumer purchase decisions for appliances.

1. Social media has grown exponentially in a very short space of time, yet many businesses remain unsure how to optimize social media. Has your company invested resources in social media as a communications tool, or are you waiting for a more robust success model?

Meyersohn: I don’t believe very much in social media. I believe in digital technology, of which social media is one component. You need to understand why your consumers and customers are using social media, and what for. And then you need to provide a solution in that context. If I look at my industry, which is the appliance industry, consumers don’t use social media as a communications vehicle. Whether young or old, they will go online, go to websites, whether retailer or the appliance manufacturer, and they do searches and they look at reviews. But you have little conversation around social media. You have some conversation around reviews. If you are buying an appliance, you may have some conversation with the website. But the social media, you have very little conversation around it.

2. What specific resources have you allocated to social media?

Meyersohn: We are leveraging a lot of what the U.S. has done. So for Facebook, they allocated a team of customer service representatives, which are dealing with all the discussions and requests that come from the Facebook page. In our case, the social media is managed through the customer service people. They are the same people that would have been in the call centre before. They understand the escalation process and how to manage it. And in Canada, we are going to develop some initiatives more around the blogging community.

3. Are they primarily in-house or are you using agencies?

Meyersohn: We are using both. Some of the social media is done in-house since we are reviewing our digital strategy and we are using strategic external resources to help us do so. We even have people in Mexico helping us with the website design, and also use external resources in the U.S. to ensure we have the latest tools to develop the right platform.

4. What research tools have you used to understand how your customers use social media to identify/buy your products or services?

Meyersohn: In our industry, you have three types of customers. You have the national accounts, like Sears. Second you have independents, which are smaller retailers, which have one or three locations. And third, you have business people that build new homes. The reality when it comes to social media is very few of the independents are there yet. It’s mostly the bigger retailers involved in social media. And when you look at bigger retailers, we have ten major customers. And we meet with them regularly. It’s very much one-on-one, meeting to understand their digital strategy and what they intend to do, and then we align our strategy.

5. Did social media play a role in growing your business in the last 12 months, and if so, how?

Meyersohn: It’s a tough question. I’ve been on the bad side of social media. We did a partnership with Top Chef Canada, and they have a Facebook page, and a blog. And there was an episode where the contestants had to do a French meal and one had to use horsemeat. It became this big thing on Facebook, starting with some people from the U.S. complaining on the Canadian web page. One Facebook page even called for a boycott of Top Chef Canada. And this all got picked up by CNN and other media. But in calling for a boycott of the sponsors, they got half the sponsors wrong.

So Facebook remains relevant for us from a customer service perspective. But social media cannot so much drive purchases as it can drive perceptions and it can create negatives.

6. How do you measure the return on investment for your social media activities?

Meyersohn: You can’t measure ROI, so what you do is try to find some proxy. Some people look at the number of mentions in your share of voice, some at the number of likes. But already, with online ads, it’s very hard to measure ROI. Imagine with social media.

7. How do you measure the success or failure of your social media strategy?

Meyersohn: We just did with one of our retailers a contest and we would argue it was very successful. Why? It was contest through Facebook where people had to describe how they would use appliances to renovate a kitchen. We had 90,000 views, 43,000 entries, and the retailer had 9,000 people opt into their email list. And we got 6,500 people who went to our website to look at the appliances. In this case, the retailer knows the difficulty of getting people to register onto the email lists. So that has a concrete value for them because they know how much they normally have to spend for that. And in our case, we know we reached 6,500 people with page views of our website that they didn’t have to make. So we engaged 6,500 people specific to our brand, and that gave us a certain level of exposure. And I know the cost and I can do a cost-per-thousand to determine the engagement.

8. Specific to your social media activities, based on what you learned in 2011, what will you do differently in 2012 and what will you do the same?

Meyersohn: I’m going to be much more focused on my website. Social media is great, but you need a very strong website, and you need to make sure the website delivers the information your consumers want. You can’t go big on social media until you have that foundation.

The second thing I would do differently is try to find a way to tie the social media activity to sales, whether through couponing, or whatever is the tool. I want to link the two or understand how we can measure the foot traffic or something that has concrete value for us. If I can say my cap-ex generated X for foot traffic, then I know the traffic generated. And I would not do things in isolation, but work with our retail partners in any social media campaign.

9. What is your New Year’s resolution for social media in your place of business?

Meyersohn: Again, I believe social media is only 10% of my problem or the puzzle I’m trying to solve. Social media is an angle, but there are so many other elements that complement it, including search engine, marketing and optimization. You have your website, your blog, your conversations and apps that you’re going to develop. So my resolution is to make digital a key part of the business strategy, and social media in that strategy will be a small piece.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based business reporter. twitter.com/etanvlessing

My name is Evan Carmichael and I believe that the fastest and most effective way to build a business is to model the strategies of people who have already done what you’re trying to do. I call it Modeling the Masters. My last post with over 50 comments was 60 Inspirational Quotes for 2012.

Today we're going to look at how a mother of two was forced to start a business when her husband left her to travel the Americas. Having no formal training, her survival instinct kicked in and she built one of the most trusted brands in the world. This is the story of the Body Shop's Anita Roddick and the top 3 lessons that you can learn from her success.

Must Watch Video

"Whatever you do, be different... If you're different, you will stand out." - Anita Roddick

Anita Roddick (born Anita Perella, 23 October 1942 – 10 September 2007) was a British businesswoman, human rights activist and environmental campaigner, best known as the founder of The Body Shop, a cosmetics company producing and retailing beauty products that shaped ethical consumerism. She was born into a hard-working immigrant family and her mother ran a successful cafe which kept the young Roddick occupied for most of her childhood. In addition to a strong work ethic, her mother also taught her the concept of recycling and how valuable it could be for businesses. After graduating school she took a trip around the world and eventually wound up in Johannesburg, South Africa where she disobeyed the laws of apartheid by attending a jazz club on ‘black night’ and was sent back to England. Upon arriving back home she met Gordon Roddick and felt she had an "instant bond" with him. The two married and opened up a restaurant and hotel together.

After three years of running the two businesses, Gordon decided that he wanted to fulfill his life-long dream of riding a horse from Buenos Aires, Argentina to New York City. They sold the restaurant business and Anita stayed home with their two children. While Gordon was away on his adventure she decided to create her own cosmetics store that would sell natural and environmentally conscious products. She started off selling 15 cosmetic products that she made in her garage and packaged in recycled bottles to reduce the cost. She soon opened a second location and by the time her husband had returned from his trip, people were already asking about franchising rights.

By 2004 the Body Shop had almost 2,000 stores and served over 77 million customers around the world. It was also considered one of the most trusted brands in the world. On March 17, 2006, L'Oréal bought the Body Shop for £652 million ($973 million). With the sale Roddick became more involved in charity work and began giving away her money to causes she believed in. When she died in 2007 she left her estate to charities.

Action Item #1: Get Past Survival

We all have big dreams for what we want ourselves and our companies to become but in order to make those dreams a reality you need to first get past the survival point with your business. You need to know that your company will be able to give you enough money to put food on the table and pay your bills. This is one of the most important first steps you need to accomplish as you start your business. Once you have enough money coming in you can focus on shooting for your bigger goals.

When Anita Roddick first started the Body Shop it wasn't because she wanted to create social and environmental change. With her husband gone she had to find a way to make money to support herself and her two children. The main reason behind opening the Body Shop was so that her family could survive. As an example, she couldn't afford more than 700 empty bottles so she took the unusual step of offering five sizes of every product. Even though she had very few products initially, when you entered her 370 square foot store it would give the illusion that she carried over 120 products.

According to Roddick: "Nobody was stupid enough to offer five sizes of one product; it simply didn’t make sense. We turned it around into a survivor’s option: customers pick up the size they want and come back every week for a refill. Recycling had nothing to do with being environmentally conscious at that point... My goal was livelihood... At the forefront of my mind at the time there was really only one thought – survival... I started the Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon’s advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking."

Action Item #2: Use Your Business to Do Good

The most successful businesses seem to be the ones who don't just focus on making money but instead try to be a force for good in their industry. Entrepreneurs are also now leading the way to help others beyond their customers - they are using their companies to support the communities around them and give back - not just because they can but because it also makes good business sense.

Anita Roddick's social and ecological conscience initially stemmed from a lack of money. She had to recycle bottles because she couldn't afford to buy new ones. The store was painted green because she wanted to hide the damp stains on the walls. However, as the Body Shop grew to become a powerful player in the cosmetics business, Roddick began to use her newfound influence to try to have a positive impact on the world around her.

According to Roddick: "I hate the beauty business. It is a monster industry selling unattainable dreams. It lies. It cheats. It exploits women. I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in... If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?”

Action Item #3: Learn by Doing

It's hard to learn how to be an entrepreneur from a book. You can read to get inspired or to get new ideas but nothing is really going to happen until you start to apply those ideas into your business. You can use books and courses to supplement your knowledge and give you guidance but you have to actually apply what you're learning if you really want to understand and retain the information.

Anita Roddick never learned about being an entrepreneur at school. Instead she learned from her mother who she saw worked tirelessly to make her cafe successful. While other cafes kept regular 9 to 5 hours, her mother opened at dawn for the local fishermen and didn't close until the last customer had left. Roddick had never read a book on economic theory in her life and while her naysayers believed this would be her downfall, Roddick saw it as one of her competitive advantages.

According to Roddick: "I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship – even by hallowed institutions like Harvard and Stanford – but I’m not all convinced it is a subject you can teach. How do you teach obsession, because more often than not it’s obsessions that drives an entrepreneur’s vision? Why would you march to a different drumbeat if you are instinctively part of the crowd?... They will not teach you the most crucial thing of all: how to be an entrepreneur. They might also sap what entrepreneurial flair you have as they force you into the template called an MBA... If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management...by not knowing any of that, I had an amazing freedom... Potential entrepreneurs are outsiders. They are people who imagine things as they might be, not as they are, and have the drive to change the world around them. Those are skills that business schools do not teach."

True Story

Anita Roddick's first location was next to a funeral parlor, giving a whole new meaning to the Body Shop name. When she began franchising she had little experience and decided not to charge startup or royalty fees. However, before she would accept franchisees, they would have to interview with her. Roddick asked off the wall questions like "What is your favourite flower?" and "How would you like to die?" to get to know her candidates on a more personal level.

More Quotes

"Crazy people see and feel things that others don’t. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too."

"To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality."

"If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito."

What Do You Think?

How did you get past the survival stage with your company? Do you think entrepreneurship can be taught? What part of Anita Roddick's message impacted you the most? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Evan Carmichael

To learn more check out my list of Anita Roddick articles or my website, EvanCarmichael.com.