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| Jill Salzman |
What made you decide to take the plunge
into self-employment?
I’d just graduated from law school and
knew that I was not going to practice law.
I also knew that I wanted to create an environment where I could be home
with the kids and making money at the same time. Child labor laws prevented me from going one
route, so I opted to launch my own business instead.
What is the biggest challenge that you
face as an entrepreneur?
It depends on the day. One day it’s accounting, another it’s legal,
and most days it’s marketing. Finding
customers and clients is a pretty big one.
But for the most part, figuring out how to get my work done and feed my
family all in one day takes the top of the cake, most of the time.
If you had to give a piece of advice to a
girlfriend that was thinking about starting her own small business, what would
that be?
I’d ask her to sell me on her idea. Then I’d tell her to go out and find friends,
family and strangers and pitch her product or service to them. My first piece of advice for anyone is to
figure out whether there’s a market for what they’re selling. Too many people spend far too much time
planning, thinking, planning, waiting, wondering if it’s the right time, creating
a laundry list of worries, and then planning some more. I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs spend
upwards of 2 years prepping their product launch only to find out, post-launch,
that no one is interested in buying it.
I’m very much a dive-in-first-and-then-plan kinda gal, and since it’s
worked for me three times, I’m confident it’s going to work for someone else,
too.
What small business resources can you not
live without?
Twitter.
And Tadalist. And
LessAccounting.com. And Google Docs. And Wordpress. And Evernote.
And Skype. And most importantly,
My First Ticonderoga #2 pencils.
Tell us about The Founding Moms and how
mom entrepreneurs can benefit from joining.
The Founding Moms is a collective of
meetups and educational resources for mom entrepreneurs. We’re in 30+ cities to date with 2,500+
members around the world, including cities in Canada and Australia (and soon
Germany, too.) We host kid-friendly
meetups each month where we come together to help one another through
education, advice, speakers and networking to better build our businesses. We’ll be launching an online platform soon
and there’ll be a lot of benefit to each of these members in their cities connecting
with members outside of their home area.
Very exciting. The benefits to
joining? There’s the practical stuff,
like advice and tips on all areas of entrepreneurship that you can write down,
go back to your office and put into practice.
There’s the intangible, like the networking and brainstorming that
happens at each Founding Moms’ Exchange (which is what we call our
meetups.) But then there’s the real
gold: the inspiration and confidence
that you get from connecting with other like-minded women. Every month I head back to work after an
Exchange and feel even better about what I’m doing. It’s indescribable, really, but outstanding
and happens each and every month.
You just published your first book: Found It: A Field Guide for Mom Entrepreneurs,
tell us about the book and how we can purchase a copy!
Sure!
I wanted to write a quick-read guide for women who were interested in
launching their own businesses, or who were already running small businesses
but wanted to grow bigger. I knew a lengthy,
well-researched book was not really up any mom entrepreneur’s alley, so I
gunned for a bathroom read and put together 51 short, to-the-point chapters
that you can read and refer to again and again.
The first half of the book is all about starting up and sustaining a
great company. The second half is about
how to do all of the first part’s bits with kids in the mix. Humorist John Hartzell of MiddleAgeRiot.com
agreed to do the illustrations for my book, and we made them black and white so
kids could color them in. The last part
is not true but I just figured out that crayons would totally work on
them.
You can purchase it at http://www.bit.ly/jillsbook1
which is the only place to get a signed copy.
It’s on Amazon, too. The e-book
is available through BarnesAndNoble.com and it’s in Barnes & Nobles’ stores
nationwide.
When deciding to write your book, what
was the biggest stumbling block?
The writing of the book was the easy
part. The chapters almost fell out of my
head and onto paper and I completed it in literally 6ish weeks. The hardest part was figuring out whether to
self-publish or to find a publisher. I
spent much too long waiting for my agent to nab a publishing deal, when in
reality most pub deals are pretty bad these days as the industry
struggles. But when I decided to
self-publish, there were so many new challenges that I didn’t even know to know
that it held things up for a bit. Which
printer? How to distribute? What size book? Who would design it? Those things.
Fortunately (and clearly) I figured them out and here I am!
My thanks again to Jill for a wonderful interview. To learn more about Founding Moms or to contact Jill directly, please visit:
www.sleeveshirtconsulting.com
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