If You Were Dying... Would Gratitude Be Your First Thought?

Personal Development

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What would you do if you were told you had only a few weeks to live? When Joan Zawoiski Lewis found out she was dying from pancreatic cancer, the grandmother from Pringle, Pennsylvania, told family and friends: “Don’t make a fuss. Just <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-give-back-purposefully/">do something nice</a> for somebody else. Then tell me about it.”



People from every state and continent would eventually heed “Joannie from Pringle” as her request spread and made the news. Word of good deeds came daily, and Joan Lewis enjoyed reading the accounts again and again.



“An acquaintance of mine didn’t have enough to eat the past few weeks, so I stopped off with a few bags of groceries,” wrote Julia Kristan on Joan Lewis’ CaringBridge.org page. “Thank you for living such an inspiring life. You’ve turned sadness into joy and hopelessness into a rippling pool of raised spirits and good deeds. If even a quarter of the world decided to live more like you, what a world it would be.”



“I cleaned up trails at Addison State Park in central Vermont just for her,” Drew Johnson wrote.



“I gave my co-worker a hug in your honor this morning,” another person said.



“First day of school is always a challenge for teachers. We made a batch of lemon bars and sent them to the faculty with our seventh-grader today to make their day a little sweeter,” KW wrote.



“Gave an elderly woman on the streets in Dublin some money because Joannie from Pringle would do it,” wrote another.



Meanwhile, Joan Lewis’ days turned into weeks. In 2009, a month after being told that her stage four pancreatic cancer had metastasized to the liver, limiting her lifespan to just weeks or even mere days, Joan Lewis felt well enough to cross off bucket-list items. She floated in a hot air balloon over farms and old barns in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she lived with her daughter Jocelyn Lewis. The next week, she stayed in the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan and sat in a second-row seat for a taping of ABC’s The View.



Months turned into a year. Her attitude, natural fortitude and the outpouring of positivity from others enabled her to hang on long enough to undergo—and then tolerate—chemotherapy, says her daughter Jacqueline Lewis.



“Not only is Miss Joannie still alive one year after her grim prognosis (because of YOU!! And all the good deeds you’ve shared),” stated an update on the<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Joannie-from-Pringle/132904590072476" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Joannie from Pringle Facebook page</a> from Oct. 15, 2010, “but last week she was even able to drive again. So keep those cards and letters coming.”



As a result of all of this, Jacqueline Lewis was inspired to start the<a href="https://gratitude.crowdmap.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> World Gratitude Map</a>, a crowdsourcing website launched in October 2010 that invites everyone around the world to briefly tell others why they’re grateful. If her mom had, against the odds, been able to live so long by focusing on good deeds, she thought, why not start this map so that we could all focus on the positive and feel good? Public health practitioners use maps to track bad things like gun violence and flu outbreaks—what if we used maps to track good? “Gratitude is contagious,” states the map’s motto. “Click on 'Submit a report' to tell us why you're glad. Your 'red dot' will appear on the World Gratitude Map.”



“Grateful my brother got a new job after being out of work for three years,” wrote an Austin, Texas, resident for one dot on the map.



“<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/do-you-have-to-be-passionate-about-your-job/">I love what I do</a> and the people I work with,” wrote someone in Tupelo, Mississippi.



“I’m thankful my boss/landlord helped me get an apartment so my boys and I wouldn’t be homeless. I still need a warm place for my chickens,” jotted another.



<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/7-ways-to-practice-gratitude-to-help-you-grow/">Gratitude can be transformative</a>. A 2019 study published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that writing daily about things that make you grateful brings a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6437090/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">better sense of well-being</a>, happiness and satisfaction. Additionally, a 2020 <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022399920301847" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">review of existing literature</a> on the subject determined that gratitude has the potential to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-new-secrets-of-perfect-sleep/">improve sleep quality</a>.



“The stories we tell create the people we become,” says Jacqueline Lewis, who blogged about resilience at GlobalResilience.net. Her mother’s experience of seeking out stories of hope and generosity helped create the sunny world she chose to live in. “We’d say, ‘In Joannie’s World, the sun is always shining, people wake up singing and the cocoa is made from scratch.’”



Joan Lewis herself was taken aback as more months passed, letting her add and cross off more bucket-list items, including watching, from her wheelchair, the University of Connecticut women’s team play a March 2011 NCAA tournament game. (She flirted with a police officer there, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter noted. “I don’t miss any opportunities, you know,” Joan Lewis quipped.)



“These last 18 months have been like Tom Sawyer’s funeral, a chance to hear and be surprised by people thanking me for affecting them. I am so blessed, the luckiest woman on Earth, really,” Joan Lewis told a reporter via email for an Apr. 1, 2011, article in The Citizens’ Voice in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. “I especially love the notes that tell me what good deeds people have done in honor of ‘Joannie from Pringle.’”



Her luck eventually ran out. Twenty months after her diagnosis, Joan Lewis, 74, passed away in her bed at home surrounded by sweet-scented cut rhododendrons, lilacs and roses. This coming May 7 marks the 12th anniversary. Jacqueline Lewis reflected: “Her 20-month survival was nothing short of miraculous—but it’s not just the length of time which is notable here.”



<h2 id="h-try-this-gratitude-exercise">Try this gratitude exercise</h2>



For the next five days, do the following daily:



Think of three things that happened that day for which you’re grateful. Jot them down. As days pass, you may notice that you’re now on the lookout throughout the day for reasons to be grateful. You may easily come up with a dozen candidates that you’ll whittle down to three for your list—and your attitude will perk up as you start to see the world <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-ways-to-use-gratitude-to-break-out-of-a-slump/">in a more positive light</a>, says Jacqueline Lewis, co-founder of the World Gratitude Map.&nbsp;



This article was published in March 2014 and has been updated. Photo by fizkes/Shutterstock

When Joan Zawoiski Lewis found out she was dying from pancreatic cancer, the grandmother from Pringle, Pennsylvania, told family and friends: “Don’t make a fuss. Just do something nice for somebody else. Then tell me about it.”

When Joan Zawoiski Lewis found out she was dying from pancreatic cancer, the grandmother from Pringle, Pennsylvania, told family and friends: “Don’t make a fuss. Just do something nice for somebody else. Then tell me about it.” | SUCCESS

If You Were Dying&#8230; Would Gratitude Be Your First Thought?

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If You Were Dying... Would Gratitude Be Your First Thought? | SUCCESS

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These Are Nicole Lapin’s 6 Money Tips for Living Your Richest Life

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Achieve financial success and freedom

Purchase that daily latte, advises financial expert <a href="https://nicolelapin.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nicole Lapin</a>. Surprised? That’s not her only unusual advice.



“It’s not your momma’s finance lesson,” Lapin says in describing her book, <a href="https://amzn.to/38e2Cad" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rich Bitch: A Simple 12-Step Plan for Getting Your Financial Life Together... Finally</a>. Throughout the book, she shares personal anecdotes and examples, such as how she painlessly eliminated a $5,000 credit-card balance.



Lapin wants to take the mystery out of finance. She avoids off-putting conventional terms and empowers women to take control of their financial affairs. Lapin says that the word Bitch in her new book’s title shouldn’t be considered bad and that it really just means a woman who stands up for herself, while Rich alludes to a fulfilling life. A former CNBC and CNN news anchor who has been called a “money guru for millennials,” Lapin, 31, reported at the forefront of the Great Recession.



“There is a new normal. It’s not the American Dream anymore. This is your dream and your destiny. It’s about taking it into your own hands,” Lapin says. “You don’t need a man or the right schooling or to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth.” You do need a plan, though—and here are six tips from her 12-step plan:



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-go-ahead-and-buy-coffee-from-a-barista">1. Go ahead and buy coffee from a barista.</h2>



Ignore the traditional advice that makes you feel guilty or stupid for not making your own coffee. Sure, there are online “coffee savings calculators” that show how much you’d save if you skipped the $3.50 once-a-day habit in favor of 25-cents-a-cup homemade java ($1,138, says <a href="https://www.dollartimes.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DollarTimes.com</a>’s calculator). But Lapin blasts latte vilification as a goofy scare tactic that depresses your mood and makes you want to binge on something else later. Her approach: Think of yourself as someone who has billable hours, like a lawyer, because <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/time-is-your-most-valuable-resource-dont-waste-it/">your time is valuable</a>. If you waste several minutes fussing with the coffeemaker each morning, then it might be cost-effective to buy your brew. “The idea that you need to deprive yourself in order to reach financial freedom or Shangri-La is silly. I hope people rethink conventional financial wisdom,” Lapin says. “Start thinking for yourself and investing in yourself because that’s going to pay the most dividends later.” Besides, she figures the lattes might put a little spring in your step at work and motivate you to try to land a raise that exceeds the $1,100 you’d save on the lattes.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-ask-for-a-raise-and-get-it">2. Ask for a raise and get it.</h2>



Find out what people with your experience earn in your industry by going to websites such as <a href="https://salary.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Salary.com</a> and <a href="https://www.payscale.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Payscale.com</a> to come up with a raise request that’s on the high end, Lapin advises in her book. Arm yourself with key examples of your great performance, including how you’ve helped the company. Timing is everything, so she suggests <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-ask-for-more-money/">asking for a raise</a> after a fantastic job review or a client sings your praises.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-write-down-your-goals-and-turn-them-into-an-elevator-pitch">3. Write down your goals and turn them into an elevator pitch.</h2>



To live the life you want, you need to know what it is. Distill them into a few seconds of spoken words you’ll remember. Studies show that women who can clearly craft a narrative for themselves—and mentally embrace it—have a better chance of reaching those goals, Lapin says. Create three lists: one for family, another for finances and another for fun. State your goal for the current year, in the near future (years three and five), and further out (years seven and 10). Example: Lapin’s current fun list includes going out for drinks with girlfriends every week. In year five, she hopes to get new furniture and move into a bigger apartment. In year 10, she wants to take a first-class vacation. So it’s about creating your own story and speaking your goals aloud, which makes it much easier to stay focused on them. “Becoming a Rich Bitch is not about deprivation. It’s not about clipping coupons. It’s not about nickel-and-diming yourself or buying stale bread,” Lapin tells SUCCESS. You can enjoy small indulgences and still reach your money goals, but the <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/rohn-4-tips-for-setting-powerful-goals/">first step is to have goals</a>. “While some people think they do have goals, they’ll be very surprised when they sit down to actually put pen to paper.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-4-negotiate-your-bills-and-purchases-and-find-extra-money-by-making-your-social-network-work-for-you">4. Negotiate your bills and purchases, and find extra money by making your social network work for you.</h2>



Lapin likes to negotiate and once bought a floor-model couch for about 70 percent off. Department stores typically will discount 10 to 15 percent for a fabric snag or other minor imperfection, she says. Lapin makes it a habit to negotiate with cable and phone companies. “When you remember that everything is negotiable and it’s ultimately your money, it becomes not only empowering but really fun at the same time to see how much you can get off.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-5-behold-the-new-lbd">5. Behold the new LBD.</h2>



Instead of a little black dress, it’s a “little <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/6-real-life-budgeting-tips-to-save-more-money/">budget</a> diary.” Yes, you can indulge in little luxuries that make you happy, but you still need to track them. Keep tabs on small expenditures throughout your day so you can see where the money goes.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-6-get-rid-of-a-5-000-credit-card-balance">6. Get rid of a $5,000 credit card balance.</h2>



Aghast when she owed $5,000, Lapin acknowledged the problem by affixing a sticky note that read “$5,000” to the top of her computer screen. She gave herself two years to pay it off, $208 each month (almost $7 a day). She set up a monthly automatic payment of $208 from her checking account. “Because I didn’t ever see that money, I found that I didn’t really miss it.”



“I have many confessions throughout the book to show other women that they’re not alone,” Lapin says. Even though she reported for business news networks, “I was once clueless. I never learned about personal finance in school. And we don’t really like talking about it with friends, as women. I figured it out through the school of hard knocks, which is the best school, in my opinion.”



Lapin hopes to impress on women that they must take charge of their money to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-complete-guide-to-money-how-to-create-wealth/">achieve financial security</a> and fulfill their dreams. Along the way, they should celebrate small victories to stay motivated. Lapin knew that she had made it when she could buy as many pricey avocados as she wanted. What is your motivator? “It can be as big as a house or as small as an avocado,” Lapin writes. Once there, “cherish the moment and don’t forget the struggle.”



This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/magazines/success-magazine-april-2015-arianna-huffington.html">April 2015 issue of </a><a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/magazines/success-magazine-april-2015-arianna-huffington.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SUCCESS</a><a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/magazines/success-magazine-april-2015-arianna-huffington.html"> magazine</a> and has been updated. Photo courtesy of Nicole Lapin

‘Not your momma's finance lesson’: Money expert Nicole Lapin gets personal about finance and suggests steps for living the life you want.

Money expert Nicole Lapin gets personal about finance and suggests steps for living the life you want. | SUCCESS

Nicole Lapin's 6 Money Tips for Living Your Richest Life

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Professional Growth

Professional Growth Archives

Professional Growth | SUCCESS | What Achievers Read

<div id="_idContainer001" class="Basic-Text-Frame">
Who needs the help of a recruiting service? Land interviews and wow prospective employers in 13 easy steps.
Related: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/the-best-career-advice-from-successful-people-who-made-it-to-the-top">The Best Career Advice, From Successful People Who Made It to the Top</a>
1. Network with everybody you’ve ever worked with; <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/5-tips-for-networking-your-way-to-a-job-on-linkedin">connect on LinkedIn</a> with each person you meet on the job. “LinkedIn will be a lifeline for your next job,” says Don Raskin, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Little-Secrets-Getting-Dream/dp/1942872763/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1469733021&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=The+Dirty+Little+Secrets+of+Getting+Your+Dream+Job.&amp;linkCode=ll1&amp;tag=sm0fe-20&amp;linkId=9af5d28b0757b3864cc2b801dee1b4fc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Dirty Little Secrets of Getting Your Dream Job.</a>

</div>
2. Google your name—your interviewer will. Don’t like what you see? Update your profiles on social media (especially LinkedIn and Twitter) to accurately reflect your professional self. Clean up your Facebook and Instagram accounts or make them private. Dynamic, positive content on active social media accounts will rank high in a Google search, advises Thomas Choberka of the law firm Kelley Kronenberg in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
3. “Make sure your online presence reflects the awesome candidate that you are,” advises executive performance coach Andrea James of Seattle-based Solve for X Coaching. To <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/podcast/ep-14-market-yourself">spread the word that you’re current on job skills</a>, write about your achievements on your LinkedIn profile; endorse others on LinkedIn; and encourage them to reciprocate.
4. Talk to the right person at prospective companies. To find the names of hiring managers, search LinkedIn, advises Liz Ryan of <a href="https://www.humanworkplace.com/what-is-the-human-workplace/">HumanWorkplace.com</a>. Then call the hiring manager. Think of yourself as someone who can solve a particular pain for your desired employer, Ryan suggests, and use that as a pitch for an interview.
5. If your first contact is by email, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/10-best-practices-for-making-a-good-impression">make a great impression.</a> Don’t say, “Please see attached,” Raskin says. Briefly entice the interviewer to read your attached résumé and cover letter, possibly starting this way: I read about the terrific position available at your firm and feel that my internship with XYZ Co. would be a huge asset.
6. Understand the position. Don’t apply for an advertising job when your background is in something else—a misstep Raskin sees daily.
Related: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/5-things-to-do-before-your-next-job-interview">5 Things to Do Before Your Next Job Interview</a>
7. Make small talk with the receptionist as you wait for <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/12-ways-to-mess-up-a-job-interview-and-12-ways-to-ace-it">your job interview</a>; the boss may ask his or her opinion of you.
8. Present yourself as the best in class during interviews. “Everyone wants to buy the best,” Raskin says. Give examples of initiative, such as how a boss let you run with your idea. Express enthusiasm! Right: I initiated my own programming at a college radio station. Wrong: I worked at a college radio station—no one listened. “You can take any situation and be enthusiastic about it,” Raskin says.
9. Be yourself, honestly and transparently. Says Eber Oroz, a recruiter for SMX Services &amp; Consulting in Miami: We’d rather hire an upfront go-getter who can <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/podcast/ep-12-how-to-learn-something-new">learn a missing skill</a> than one who misrepresents his abilities and would have to be replaced in a month.
10. Ask for a business card at the end of each job interview, Raskin says, and write a thank-you note or email to every interviewer.
11. <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/what-not-to-wear-to-an-interview">Take care with your appearance.</a> Dress up, not down—better than day-to-day job requirements; the company’s website or Facebook page might have dress-code clues, Raskin says.
12. Have names and contact information for references—pre-notify these folks so they’re ready if contacted.
13. Résumé trick: View online résumés from your field so yours measures up to the industry’s expected style, Raskin suggests.
Related: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/8-reasons-why-you-didnt-get-the-job">8 Reasons Why You Didn't Get the Job</a>

This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://store.successcom.wpenginepowered.com/success-magazine-september-2016-gabby-douglas.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">September 2016 issue of SUCCESS magazine</a>.

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Longevity &amp; Performance

Longevity &amp; Performance Archives

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<div>Get a new job. Land a promotion. What would you do if you weren’t afraid?Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg posed that query in her best-seller <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385349947/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0385349947&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=sm0fe-20&amp;linkId=3XUPXQSASCP3NSOL">Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead</a>. Hundreds of thousands of women worldwide have looked inside themselves so they can identify and overcome barriers, according to the book’s spinoff organization, <a href="https://leanin.org/about/" target="_blank" title="About | LeanIn.org" rel="noopener">Leanin.org</a>. Below, seven women recount their lean-in experiences and offer advice and inspiration to others.</div><div><h3>Emily Chang</h3>Emily Chang cried in bed one night while worrying: Could she handle a TV anchor job and becoming a mom? Seven months pregnant, she wondered: Maybe I’ll need to quit—after working up to her anchor post through so many long workdays and missed vacations. She didn’t want to choose between TV and motherhood. Then she leaned in.She reached out to successful working moms she knew to crowdsource their advice, which boiled down to this supportive message: She could handle both, and what’s important is quality time with your child, not quantity. It worked. Chang went on to host not one but two shows and, by November 2014, found herself seven months pregnant (her second son was born in January). “This year has been my most challenging yet as a working mom,” she said “but by far the most rewarding.“Being pregnant and having a rambunctious 2-year-old and an increasingly demanding full-time job is like trying to run two marathons at once,” said Chang, who anchors the daily tech show Bloomberg West and more recently launched the weekly interview show Studio 1.0, in which she talks with influencers in tech, media and entertainment. “As my pregnancy progressed, I got bigger, slower and busier while my [toddler] son only wanted to be chased, tickled and tackled &nbsp;more.”And just when she thought she nailed the balancing act, Chang rushed home from a long day excited to see her boy. “My precious little angel said straight to my face, ‘No, Mommy, I want Daddy.’“I burst into tears.”Immediately she reached out to her SWAT team of fellow mothers with this question: What am I doing wrong? “Nothing,” they replied. “He’s 2. Don’t take it personally. Tomorrow, he’ll do the same thing to Daddy.”“The crowdsourcing of working mommyhood has been one of my most productive personal discoveries,” Chang said. No matter the question—When do I start potty training? Why won’t he eat dinner?—multiple messages instantly hit her inbox from moms who’ve been there, done that, with no judgment at all.“I couldn’t do what I do without amazing support at home, at work, and, of course, my husband, who’s there for our child so often when I cannot be. Yes, I still feel guilty all the time. Yes, I feel like I’m not doing enough for everyone all the time,” Chang said. “But I know that’s my problem. It’s just who I am. I’m also someone who happens to love being a mom more than anything in the world and love my job, too. I don’t have a secret except to say when you need help, ask for it. It’s much better than trying to really ‘do it all’ all by yourself.”<div><h3>Frances Hesselbein</h3>Long before 5-foot-2 Frances Hesselbein became sought out by Army generals and White House chiefs of staff for her leadership advice (making her look something like “Yoda dispensing wisdom to Jedi knights,” as author Jim Collins put it), she was a young married mom in Johnstown, Pa., fending off requests that she lead a 30-member Girl Scout troop that otherwise would disband.“I did not want to take a troop. I was the mother of a little boy. I knew nothing about little girls,” Hesselbein recounted in her book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470905735/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0470905735&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=sm0fe-20&amp;linkId=VF7VPRLC6CKH4VXB">My Life in Leadership</a>.She relented, and in a pattern that would repeat, she agreed to volunteer for only six weeks until they found a “real leader”… and ended up staying for years. She later agreed to fill in for six months as executive director of her local Girl Scout Council until a “real leader” could be found… and stayed for years until she became CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, which at the time “was near collapse,” as President Bill Clinton would describe it two decades later, in 1998, when he bestowed on her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She earned it, he said, for turning around the organization’s numbers by actively recruiting girls from all races and backgrounds while boosting cohesion, making it “a model for us all.”In Hesselbein’s view, a key “lean in” experience happened early in the Girl Scouts’ turnaround, when a business leader told her: “You have to stop this diversity stuff. Nobody wants to hear about it, and if you keep it up, you will never raise any money!” She didn’t take the advice, and the Scouts’ capital campaign raised $10 million, as she noted in an essay at <a href="https://leanin.org/about/" target="_blank" title="About | LeanIn.org" rel="noopener">LeanIn.org</a>. (You can read more about all of the women in this article through their essays on <a href="https://leanin.org/about/" target="_blank" title="About | LeanIn.org" rel="noopener">LeanIn.org</a>.)“In my life, I don’t have roadblocks and obstacles,” Hesselbein said. “I might have something you would call a ‘challenge.’ I throw that out the window, and I call that a wonderful opportunity. When you see a roadblock or challenge as an opportunity, it is amazing how you are already halfway there,” says Hesselbein, whose many titles include president of The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, co-author of the new book Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions: Enduring Wisdom for Today’s Leaders, and former leadership chair at West Point. “It helps to have your blood type ‘B positive,’ ” she quipped. “That’s my private joke, and it’s true.”</div><div>“When you see a roadblock or challenge as an opportunity, it is amazing how you are already halfway there.”<div><h3>Amy S. Hilliard</h3>Long before Detroit native Amy S. Hilliard became president of the world’s largest black-owned cosmetics company, Fashion Fair Cosmetics, she packed everything she owned into her Volkswagen Beetle and drove to the campus of Harvard Business School to begin master’s degree classes financed with a loan. Jitters set in as she gazed at the ivy-covered buildings. She recalls thinking, I am really here. Can I do this?“I had to make up my mind at that point that I was going to lean in and do whatever I could to make it,” said Hilliard, who quit a fun New York fashion-industry job to become the first in her family to attend an Ivy League school (although her sister Gloria Mayfield Banks followed her, making them the only African-American sisters to graduate from the school’s MBA program in its history). “The responsibility I felt to my family and myself to make this work was heavy.”Hilliard recalls writing in her journal: I’m a bit scared. I have got to be able to compete. So, self, what are you going to do? Are you going to sit behind and do the minimum? “I said, I’m just going to jump right in.”She told about sitting down front in her first marketing class, where 50 percent of the grade came from class participation, and the professor called on her out of the blue to ask what she would do if she managed marketing for the hypothetical XYZ Paint Co. Without hesitation, she replied, “I’d raise the advertising budget by $5 million.”Hilliard told SUCCESS that “my knees under the table were rattling, I was so scared. What was important was I had to act like I &nbsp;knew what I was talking about [although] I&nbsp;had no clue.” She privately reassured herself: I may not have the Ivy League background that others have, but I’m just as smart. In fact, I’m better than smart because I had to be to get here. She graduated with honors, as she had done earlier at Howard University (where she currently sits on the board of trustees), and worked her way up at companies such as Gillette.Still, she almost didn’t go to Harvard. Hilliard said she walked into the kitchen at home intending to tell her father that she had decided not to go to Harvard after all. But that evaporated as he greeted her by saying, “There goes my baby, the first to go to an Ivy League school.” She said she couldn’t disappoint him, and she’s glad she didn’t. “I think there should be more women, more women of color, going after these kinds of opportunities because that’s what’s going to continue to move the ball forward. The world is changing.”</div><div><h3>Stephanie Wear</h3>At <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/5-things-to-do-before-your-next-job-interview" target="_blank" title="5 Things to Do Before Your Next Job Interview | SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener">job interview time</a>, all that stood between marine biologist Stephanie Wear and a dream promotion was that she refused to scuba dive, because she sometimes panicked and tried to resurface too quickly, which could kill her. On several occasions, a dive partner resorted to holding her legs to keep frenzied Wear from quickly surfacing, potentially endangering them both, while all Wear could think was, I&nbsp;want out. I want out of here.Yet the job posting listed scuba diving as a requirement, so Wear leaned in. “Why do I need to be a scuba diver?” she politely challenged her would-be boss during the job interview. She didn’t see diving as important to the job of coordinating an outreach project that entailed training hundreds of park managers in about 80 countries on how to communicate with the public about issues facing coral reefs. The would-be boss, it turned out, was kind of an old-school marine biologist who loved being in the water, although usually to snorkel. “I was like, ‘I will get in the water,’ ” Wear recalled, “ ‘but not with tanks. I really think I’m your person for this job.’ ”And she got it.“That job led me to an incredibly satisfying career,” Wear said. Eleven years later, she’s still with The Nature Conservancy (a total of 14 years there). She has traveled the world and led work in her field, thanks to her newer post as lead strategist for coral reef conservation. And it’s all because she challenged a job-description requirement.Wear hopes more women will do the same: “This is going to sound really cliché, but I’m just not seeing enough women in my field finding their way to leadership positions, and it’s really getting to be frustrating.” Peers tend to be men, not women. “As you get higher up, they disappear. The reasons for that are not &nbsp;clear.”Good things can come from choosing to lean in rather than to retreat. Sometimes you have to make a counterintuitive move.”<div><h3>Karyn Twaronite</h3>Tax professional Karyn Twaronite was waiting to hear whether she made partner at Ernst &amp; Young, and she suspected she’d get a phone call of congratulations if it were good news or a meeting invitation for bad news. The phone rang. She couldn’t believe it: A meeting request. For the next morning.“I felt… my career plan was falling apart,” Twaronite wrote in her <a href="https://leanin.org/about/" target="_blank" title="About | LeanIn.org" rel="noopener">LeanIn.org</a> essay. For 11&nbsp;years, she had worked her way toward partnership with help from mentors and sponsors.By chance, she was at a work dinner when she received that call, so she confided in one of the firm’s female partners, whose husband, in turn, offered advice for leaning in: Be positive during the meeting and talk about your accomplishments. Exude confidence. That’s exactly what Twaronite did, and the next year she made partner.“I’m still here. Certainly I’m very happy,” said Twaronite, nearing 25 years at the 190,000-plus-employee firm and serving as its global diversity and inclusiveness officer. “I share this because I &nbsp;want other women to know that good things can come from choosing to lean in rather than to retreat,” Twaronite wrote. “Sometimes you have to make a counterintuitive move.”She shared some key advice learned along the way: Sponsors are critical. You cannot advance or gain visibility in a huge organization without a sponsor or two. Sponsors differ from mentors. <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/woman-to-woman-5-ways-to-make-your-mentor-relationships-blossom" target="_blank" title="Woman to Woman: 5 Ways to Make Your Mentor Relationships Blossom | SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener">Mentors give advice</a>. A sponsor speaks well of you when you’re not in the room and helps you plan your moves upward. You may think you don’t have sponsors, but you do; they’re the people who hired you, promoted you, who gave you a bonus, for example.Most of the work of finding a sponsor falls on the protégé to earn it, but, as Harvard Business Review reported, based on interviews and surveys, high-potential women seem to be over-mentored and under-sponsored compared to men.“The good news is sponsorship can be earned,” Twaronite said. Here are some examples she cited: When you are working for somebody, consistently out-perform. You want your work product to make your sponsor look very good. Double-check your work so that it’s as perfect as possible. If your sponsor is going to a meeting, practice the pitch with him or her to show you have your sponsor’s best interest in mind. Swing the door wide open and ask for feedback regularly. And after you get feedback, be very open to it. Don’t shrink from challenges. They’re a reality, and Twaronite said they make her more empathetic.“I think anybody, if they reflect upon their career, they don’t have all rainbows. And I don’t think that’s bad.”<div><h3>Allison Ye</h3>Allison Ye felt imprisoned by the notion that because she was 27 and single, she was shengnu or “leftover”—unwanted, with her value depreciating day by day. That’s the societal view in her city of Beijing, where the popularized message of “leftover woman” hits her from all directions: family, friends, the media and colleagues, some of whom ask, “When are you getting married?”“In the eyes of mainstream society, women cannot truly be happy and successful without marriage, no matter how many achievements they have accumulated,” said Ye, who turns 29 this August. “For me, avoiding career fulfillment for the sake of being eligible for marriage was not the life I wanted. I began searching for an alternative path.”It struck a chord when in March 2013 she came across Sandberg’s TED Talk <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders?language=en" target="_blank" title="Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders | Ted.com" rel="noopener">Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders</a>, which stressed that apart from institutional barriers, women hold themselves back by lowering their own expectations of what they can achieve and by lacking self-confidence. Get rid of those internal barriers, Sandberg urged. Pursue your ambitions.“It was powerful and refreshing,” said Ye, who’d never heard Chinese female leaders speak openly about women’s struggles in business. “If we can take responsibility for ourselves, we can change our lives.” Inspired, Ye and a friend in May 2013 started a Lean In Circle, a group of women who meet twice monthly to support one another’s career pursuits. It’s among the 22,000-plus self-organizing Lean In Circles in 110 countries bringing together more than 300,000 women and men to share and learn together, but Ye’s circle stands out because it was the first in China.“The response has been astounding,” said Ye, noting that 20,000 people in six months began following her organization’s account on WeChat, a social media platform. She estimated her group has helped establish and support about 20&nbsp;College Circles and 10 Lean In Circles in cities across China since November 2013. “Women from around the country wrote to us asking how to get involved.”It’s all helped her realize: You can change a person’s life by changing the way that person sees the world and herself. And before women can lean in to pursue success, they need to see and believe it is &nbsp;possible.<div><h3>Erika Cashin</h3>Lt. Col. Erika Cashin of the U.S. Air Force Reserve recalls that at one point, she was the only woman out of seven squadron commanders. Once in a while at meetings, she is asked to take notes, presumably because she’s a woman. She responds: Sure, next time it’ll be so-and-so’s turn. On occasions when a dig is directed at her (oddly, usually by a woman), she makes a low-key comment—“I’m sure you weren’t serious”—to send the message that that kind of thing can’t be tolerated. In short, being a female officer is in itself an act of leaning in. But Cashin has taken it a step further: She started a Lean In Circle for military women and federal employees to provide peer mentorship.“There are not a lot of women in leadership positions, even right now,” said Cashin, a married mother of two teens who serves as commander of the 934th Mission Support Flight at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport Air Reserve &nbsp;Station.What sparked the idea was a quote she read in a magazine at a gym, a statement by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” She and friends on a girls’ night out joked about how they’re nothing like that. Cashin since has fielded emails from people interested in possibly starting their own Lean In Circles, including people deployed in the Middle East and one in Australia. “It’s kind of cool to just be part of that bigger animal.”Watch Sheryl Sandberg talk about life after Leaning In.&nbsp;</div></div></div></div></div></div>

Get a new job. Land a promotion. What would you do if you weren’t afraid?Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg posed that query in her

Get a new job. Land a promotion. What would you do if you weren’t afraid?Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg posed that query in her | SUCCESS

7 Women Who Rock

7 Women Who Rock | SUCCESS

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Zhena Muzyka sized up the bleak situation: Here she was, a 25-year-old single mom whose baby needed lifesaving surgery for a kidney defect. She punched numbers into the ATM but it wouldn’t dispense cash. “I had under $10,” she recalls. What would she do?The answer—years later—would prompt Leverage Management to buy rights to her memoirs for a potential television series based loosely on her life and produced by Mark Wahlberg. As Variety put it, the show will follow “an unemployed, modern-day hippie, with a sick infant son, who outwits some of the business world’s most successful players to build her own multimillion-dollar tea empire.”“The ‘outwit’ part is completely their imagination,” Muzyka tells SUCCESS from the artist-haven town of Ojai, Calif., population 7,500. Muzyka nowadays has moved on to her second act: She is a publisher at large for the new Enliven Books imprint of Simon &amp; Schuster’s Atria publishing group and author of what Publishers Weekly called an “unconventional, touching and personal guide to success” with her book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/147675960X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=147675960X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=sm0fe-20&amp;linkId=JZ2IB6WPB3BAT52Q">Life by the Cup: Ingredients for a Purpose-Filled Life of Bottomless Happiness and Limitless Success</a>. She hosts the Change Maker CBS Radio podcast and is a sustainable-business coach who—in answer to her original crisis—founded <a href="https://www.zhenas.com/about-us/" target="_blank" title="Zhena's Story | Zhenas.com">Zhena’s Gypsy Tea</a> in 2000 and became a pioneer of Fair Trade organic tea.“She has proved to the tea industry and beyond that doing the right thing can also result in a very profitable business,” says Paul Rice, Fair Trade USA president and CEO. “Ethics have been at the foundation of every single decision that she’s made. Because of this, she has had a significant impact on the lives of tea farmers around the world. “Little did Muzyka, 40, foresee any of this happening 15-plus years ago when she was selling clothes at a boutique, freelance editing and painting houses to scrape by while living in her one-room cabin.She remembers begging out loud: God, what do you want me to do?After state assistance, Muzyka still owed more than $17,000 for the uninsured surgery to save her son, Sage. “I have no money. I have a sick baby.… I don’t have any skills. I’m a failed writer. I [had] dropped out of college to travel to Peru to study herbal medicine with a group of ethnobotanists because I had a crush on one,” she recounts in a YouTube speech. “I didn’t have a lot of examples of successful businesspeople in my life. I did have, though, a grandmother from the Ukraine who had survived concentration camps, and she was a gypsy…”<h3>Finding a Way</h3>A solution started to form in her mind. She thought two words, gypsy and tea. Muzyka, who grew up blending teas, pictured a gypsy tea party—with belly dancing, palm reading, tea drinking and happy children running around. “I’m going to start the Gypsy Tea Co.,” she told dubious parents and friends. She figured she needed $150,000 to open a gypsy tea room. From friends and family, Muzyka managed to beg just $3,000.She thought: Am I going to return this money and move in with my parents? Or try anyway? She gave it a go, getting an espresso cart and selling tea on California street corners. Muzyka later decided to sell the cart and focus on formulating teas for cafés and restaurants. As the next step in her expansion, she threw her first gypsy tea party with musicians, a belly dancer and palm readers. She sold $1,000 worth of tea.As Muzyka recounts in her book, “it was nothing short of a miracle” that she found a key investor to grow her business at the event. “Eventually I raised over $8 million to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/4-steps-to-revolutionary-business-growth" target="_blank" title="4 Steps to Revolutionary Business Growth | SUCCESS.com">grow my business</a>,” she says. “But it didn’t happen at once.”And Muzyka wanted more than profits after visiting Sri Lankan tea workers in 2003. She resolved to end poverty for tea workers and make Fair Trade the new status quo (so far, neither has happened, she acknowledges). The low wages mean “many of them don’t even have toilets,” Muzyka says. “And when they’re too old to pluck tea anymore,” they have no savings to fall back on for basic living expenses in retirement because they make only $1.35 for picking 16,000 leaves a day, she says. Yet the average consumer enjoys conventional tea, unaware of “this suffering. Our oblivion to it is damaging.”By contrast, Fair Trade tea workers are assured of earning minimum wage equivalent to $12.50 a day plus other benefits, Muzyka says, including guaranteed health care, clean water and maternity leave. In addition, a community development premium is earmarked for programs and projects of the farmers’ choosing. Some communities buy cooking stoves, says Rice of Fair Trade USA, “saving the women a lot of time and preventing lung damage caused by cooking over an open flame.” Some use the premium for a retirement fund, while others invest it in school needs such as scholarships. Attending a university prep school costs $250 a year, Muzyka says—which represents a big chunk of a tea worker’s annual pay.<h3>The Tea Estate</h3>Whenever she visits Sri Lanka, Muzyka has an eight-hour combined train and car ride from the commercial capital of Colombo to the tea plantation where her company sources most of its tea, the Idulgashinna Tea Estate. “The trains are actually awesome, but there are no seats, so you stand and you hold on,” she says in a YouTube video. She pokes her head out a train window to gaze at the “spectacular” green valley of tea plants and tall trees and Hindu and Buddhist temples.She arrives by car and unloads refurbished laptop computers to give to excited children of tea workers. She calls it the “Robin Hood Laptop Project.” During a previous visit, she noticed the computer learning center built at the tea plantation with Fair Trade dollars had only three computers for 530 children. So when she came across an old Mac laptop in her office, she paid $20 to refurbish it and via Facebook asked friends whether they had old laptops to donate. Fifteen said yes.At the plantation, awestruck children gather around as she demonstrates the wonders of a laptop. “It gave me so much excitement to give them something that otherwise would be e-waste in the United States,” Muzyka says.Durga, a university-bound teenager, reaches for a laptop to take home. “This little girl who I’ve known since she was 8… she wants to be a computer software engineer,” says Muzyka, who later watches Durga demonstrate the laptop to her parents. “It was a really moving experience to see that little girl showing her parents her future.” (In June 2015, Muzyka plans another shipment of laptops. “Once we saturate this estate with computers, we can go to other countries.”)<h3>Building Up, Burning Out</h3>Muzyka paints a picture of pinching pennies at Zhena’s Gypsy Tea to pay a premium to tea pickers and compete on store shelves. “You’re looking at 20&nbsp;percent less margin almost out of the gate” because of costs to conform to organic and Fair Trade standards. “We had a very slim staff, very slim marketing budget. We were always crammed for space. It was my MO.”She basically camped out at her “beautiful little home-type office” furnished with couches. Her son, now 15, practically grew up there. “I was raising Sage and raising the company with full force.” While her teas were sipped in spas, hard-driving Muzyka scrimped and basically thought: I’m so glad that at least my tea gets to go to such nice places.“There was nothing that could stop me from building that company. I had such a fire in my belly. I had <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/learn-to-develop-extreme-focus" target="_blank" title="Learn to Develop Extreme Focus | SUCCESS.com">so much focus</a>,” Muzyka says. “I was herculean at building the business. I was out selling tea morning, noon and night. I was talking to angel investors every single week. I was doing brunch with customers. I was flying here, flying there. I mean, I was literally unstoppable.”The pace came with a price. Hints of trouble came during a Mexico trip when her sweetheart, Gerard Linsmeier, locked her laptop and cellphone in a safe to keep her from working. Linsmeier (whom she later married at the Idulgashinna Tea Estate) sat her in a beach chair and said, “You have to enjoy life.”Suffering migraines and other physical problems, Muzyka acknowledged her burnout on a different Mexico trip with her sister-in-law. “My body was telling me… I had to move on. It wasn’t my mind. My mind was like, You know what? You could muscle through it. Get it [revenues] to $100 million.’” She thought of daughter Mia, now 5. Was Mia getting the message that self-destruction is success? The idea distressed Muzyka. Now that her business had a new CEO, a new chief financial officer and a new vibe that came with an infusion of capital from professional investors in the wake of the 2008-2010 recession, “I realized that my job was done. I was complete.”Muzyka left the company in 2013 and is writing again after what she sees as a 14-year business detour.But she hasn’t left her gypsy roots. The Wall Street Journal covered the gypsy tea ceremony for the launch of her book. A roving tarot-card reader entertained, and Muzyka brewed five teas in a West Chelsea home in New York City.“We had belly dancers. It was mostly working women, obviously, who didn’t normally get to have those experiences. So that was wonderful,” recalls Judith Curr, the president of Simon &amp; Schuster’s Atria publishing group who hired Muzyka as publisher at large because of her talent at finding authors in the mind-body-spirit space. Curr also saw how well Muzyka fit in at a gathering to launch Marlo Thomas’s book about reinventing oneself, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476739919/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1476739919&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=sm0fe-20&amp;linkId=6U2GMAPVCTAAECN7">It Ain’t Over…Till It’s Over</a>.Talk about reinvention. Muzyka, who in her 20s fought off a meter reader from shutting off her heat, wore a Diane von Furstenberg dress to her book party. Attendees included Gloria Steinem, Diane Sawyer and… Diane von Furstenberg. The heady experience prompted Muzyka to tell friends on Facebook that she had said that morning: “I’m ready for a miracle!” And it happened. Two hours later, she was invited by Curr to the Marlo Thomas luncheon. “Lesson: Say, ‘I’m ready for a miracle!’ Second lesson? Say yes to the next thing that happens after you make that statement. Third lesson? Always bring a second good outfit in case the miracle requires you to look &nbsp;good.”<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/technically-hal-elrod-has-died-3-times" target="_self" title="Technically, Hal Elrod Has Died 3 Times... | SUCCESS.com">Desperate times call for desperate measures. Hal Elrod technically died three times… but fueled by his will and optimism (like Zhena), he survived and thrived. Read his story.</a>&nbsp;

Zhena Muzyka sized up the bleak situation: Here she was, a 25-year-old single mom whose baby needed lifesaving surgery for a kidney defect. She punched

Zhena Muzyka sized up the bleak situation: Here she was, a 25-year-old single mom whose baby needed lifesaving surgery for a kidney defect. She punched | SUCCESS

Desperate Measures Inspired This Mom to Live ‘Life by the Cup’

Desperate Measures Inspired This Mom to Live ‘Life by the Cup’ | SUCCESS

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Business &amp; Branding

Business &amp; Branding Archives

Stay ahead in business: strategies and insights for success

Brad Sterl was out of town in March at the busiest trade show of the year when he answered the phone and heard, &ldquo;We just called the fire trucks.&rdquo;The call came from back home in Pittsfield, N.H., where <a href="https://www.wmur.com/news/fire-burns-rustic-crust-in-pittsfield/24854490#!bcnmja" target="_blank" title="Fire destroys Rustic Crust pizza in Pittsfield | wmur.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">flames blew through the roof of his Rustic Crust frozen-pizza company</a>. Volunteer firefighters from nearly two dozen towns battled subfreezing temperatures to control the blaze, draining the town&rsquo;s water supply, which forced the closure of schools for the day.Sterl had founded the business in 1996 and built it into a major employer in the town of 4,100. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s as close to losing one of my children as I could imagine,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Everything I owned was in this business. It still is, I &nbsp;guess.&rdquo;Within four hours, Sterl was on a red-eye flight from California, emailing industry friends to try to figure out next steps to reopen quickly. At 1 p.m., he gasped at the 16,000-square-foot production plant. &ldquo;Wow, everything you worked for just disappeared.&rdquo; Not only was the business a loss, but there were livelihoods at stake in this town hard-hit by the recession.By 4 p.m. that day, a contractor was sizing up the situation. Within a week, work began on a scaled-down temporary facility. Meanwhile Sterl paid about 80 full-time employees, who swept up, organized things, pitched in however they could and took extra training.&ldquo;We had families that relied on us,&rdquo; Sterl explains, adding that he figures insurance will cover all or most of the payroll cost, estimated, at worst, under $500,000, in addtion to the $10 million-plus building damage. &ldquo;They have bills. I figured it was the least I could do.&rdquo; Small unemployment checks would&rsquo;ve been &ldquo;ridiculous for them,&rdquo; as many worked 50 to 60 &nbsp;hours weekly.Practically speaking, he didn&rsquo;t want staff to quit, requiring replacements: &ldquo;It would&rsquo;ve cost a lot more to train them.&rdquo; He didn&rsquo;t outsource production because he didn&rsquo;t want to share his recipe, lest it be stolen. He could&rsquo;ve bought an automated production line to replace employees, but Sterl dismisses that; his niche is time-honored hand-stretched dough and hand-topped pizzas.Rustic Pizza opened in April just three weeks later. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re back,&rdquo; read a banner, &ldquo;and we couldn&rsquo;t have done it without you.&rdquo;Some people asked Sterl: Why not shut down and take the insurance money to start a new life? &ldquo;I never thought about not opening,&rdquo; he says.So it goes. He hopes to open a bigger permanent plant by year&rsquo;s end&mdash;and hire another 20 employees.Prepare your business for natural disasters with three tips.

Brad Sterl was out of town in March at the busiest trade show of the year when he answered the phone and heard, &ldquo;We just called the fire

Brad Sterl was out of town in March at the busiest trade show of the year when he answered the phone and heard, &ldquo;We just called the fire | SUCCESS

A Small Business Rises from the Ashes

A Small Business Rises from the Ashes | SUCCESS

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As a small crowd gathered by a closed runway at a little airport outside Dallas, 40-something father of five Lane Segerstrom did an unlikely thing.Stepping onto an extra-long skateboard made of pressed corn refuse, a novel material called <a href="https://cornboardmanufacturinginc.com/#/sustainability" target="_blank" title="Corn Board Manufacturing Inc. | CornBoardManufacturingInc.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">CornBoard </a>that he hopes to popularize as the next big thing in sports equipment and building materials, he grasped the back of an SUV that roared to life and took him on a wild ride in which he tried to break the record for the fastest speed on a towed skateboard&mdash;surpassing 74 mph.The episode left Guinness World Records judge Amanda Mochan &ldquo;with sweaty palms and a racing heart,&rdquo; she noted afterward. The longboard had shot out from under Segerstrom&rsquo;s feet several times during practice runs, but at least he wore a harness that kept him safe&mdash;that wouldn&rsquo;t be true for the official try. &ldquo;If the same thing happened while unharnessed, Lane could have gone flying along with the board. This is not something that anyone in attendance wanted to witness,&rdquo; <a href="https://theskateboardersjournal.com/profiles/blogs/congrats-to-lane-segerstrom" target="_blank" title="Congrats to Lane Segerstrom, founder of Stalk It Longboards, for breaking Danny Way's landspeed record! | https://theskateboardersjournal.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Mochan noted in a blog post</a>.Finally the time came. As the Chevrolet Suburban raced down the runway on its first official run, the skateboard flew out from under Segerstrom. He held on for dear life, his body practically horizontal to the ground, with the tips of his steel-toed boots scraping pavement. But he didn&rsquo;t give up. Observers watched nervously as the second try began. The SUV reached 80.5 mph, and this time Segerstrom successfully stayed upright. Same for the next try. Averaging 78.1 mph that day in December 2010, he broke the world record. The corn-refuse longboard he trusted with his life currently resides in the Smithsonian&rsquo;s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.Now the big question: Why?&ldquo;You&rsquo;re either a genius or you&rsquo;re crazy,&rdquo; Segerstrom says now with a chuckle. &ldquo;And I think more people put me in the crazy category, but that&rsquo;s OK. I wanted to prove a point.&rdquo;All entrepreneurs stand behind their products. &ldquo;Well, I &nbsp;stood on mine,&rdquo; quips Segerstrom, who in 2009 founded Corn Board Manufacturing Inc. in McKinney, Texas, and later launched <a href="https://stalkit.com/" target="_blank" title="StalkIt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Stalk It</a>, a line of sports boards like the one he used to get into the Guinness book. He says that by proving CornBoard is strong enough to set a record, it helps sales of the skateboards, snowboards, skis, paddle boards and surfboards while also capturing the imaginations of partners and potential partners. Just like wood, CornBoard could be used to make chairs. Or furniture. Cabinetry. Flooring.His company is an experiment, and Segerstrom sees it as a possible game-changer for the environment: He takes corn &ldquo;stover&rdquo;&mdash;the stalks, husks, shanks, leaves and cobs left behind on cornfields after harvesting&mdash;and turns it into a pressed board. Farmers will earn money, more trees will remain standing and, if his plan is realized, the boards can be manufactured at small plants that dot the nation&rsquo;s farm belt, plowing extra money into rural small-town economies.So much corn stover is left on farms each year that it would wrap around Earth 21 times if it were gathered up and every bale placed end to end, Segerstrom figures. Iowa State University Extension estimates that a single acre of corn yields 8,000 pounds of stover, on average. Multiply that by the 87.4 million acres of grain corn harvested in the U.S. in a recent year, 2012, and you get plenty of stover&mdash;nearly 700 billion pounds of the stuff, which mostly is plowed back into the ground or sometimes fed to animals.At least some stover must be plowed into the soil to avoid erosion and return nutrients to the earth. But farmers are increasingly interested in figuring out how to turn some of this &ldquo;waste&rdquo; into cash. &ldquo;I think this is a potential opportunity for corn growers to get a little added value&hellip; a market that they didn&rsquo;t have prior,&rdquo; says Dennis Pennington, a bioenergy educator for Michigan State University Extension.Corn stover is being used on a small scale already. Door and window manufacturer Jeld-Wen, based in Klamath Falls, Ore., is turning it into fiberboard for doors. A couple of ethanol plants in Iowa are considering buying stover to turn into fuel. &ldquo;I am not concerned,&rdquo; Segerstrom says of the potential competition for stover. &ldquo;The amount that is available is staggering.&rdquo;Building the company hasn&rsquo;t been easy for Segerstrom. He licenses technology that was developed in a lab at the University of Illinois, and it&rsquo;s taken much tinkering on his part to figure out how to take it from creation to market. He has been working with leftover lab-test-type presses that aren&rsquo;t technically advanced (they&rsquo;re akin to an &ldquo;old Chevy,&rdquo; he says). Early this year he received a specially designed press that took him a year to develop and was built in California&mdash;a model more akin to a Ferrari. With the new press he can test his ideas for duplicating small manufacturing plants across the nation&rsquo;s breadbasket.&ldquo;We wanted to create a simple model that skilled labor could operate, but you wouldn&rsquo;t need a Ph.D. or two to run,&rdquo; Segerstrom says. The hope is that by keeping the model simple, it could be duplicated. &ldquo;So that&rsquo;s the next phase we&rsquo;re going into,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;And we&rsquo;ve got agreements with multiple companies just waiting for the product in quantity to be able to make furniture, flooring, cabinetry and all these different things.&rdquo;So how good could this be for society and the planet as a whole?&ldquo;If the alternative is making chipboard from wood, then it probably is a good thing,&rdquo; says Eric Johnson, who serves as editor in chief of Environmental Impact Assessment Review. Chipboard (or particleboard) generally has been made from sawdust. But thanks to a boom in the use of wood fuel made from sawdust, it&rsquo;s now rather scarce. &ldquo;And a lot of suppliers are cutting down trees to chip them,&rdquo; Johnson says. &ldquo;From a carbon standpoint, these trees usually would be better left standing. So if this is the case, stover is better because [the corn] will be harvested anyway. A tree, not necessarily &nbsp;so.&rdquo;The wrinkle comes in the process of converting stover to &ldquo;wood,&rdquo; Johnson says. If the transformation turns out to be very energy-intensive, it could cancel the possible benefit. Segerstrom is determined to make it a win-win.Wesley Miller, a farmer who sells stover to Segerstrom&rsquo;s company, says &ldquo;it&rsquo;s probably too early to tell&rdquo; whether it&rsquo;s worthwhile for him. &ldquo;As a farmer deal, yeah, it&rsquo;s OK. But it&rsquo;s not big income.&rdquo; Miller got involved to help Segerstrom&rsquo;s company. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a good-looking plywood. I guess you would say it is environmentally friendly because he didn&rsquo;t have to cut down a tree. And here in the Texas Panhandle, you could look for 10 to 15 miles in most any direction and never see a tree.&rdquo;And so it goes. Segerstrom hopes to popularize CornBoard, but the product is still young. As obstacles arise, he&rsquo;ll aim to pick himself up and press on. That&rsquo;s exactly what he did after trying a particular trick to encourage his 8-year-old skateboarding son to keep practicing&mdash;only for Dad to end up breaking his arm in five places. He thought: Is my last time on a skateboard going to be me crashing down and breaking my arm? Or am I &nbsp;going to come out the other side and conquer this?A year later, he made Guinness World Records. (And his son did continue skateboarding.)&ldquo;My parents raised me on a farm,&rdquo; says Segerstrom, who grew up outside Ida Grove, Iowa. &ldquo;You <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/4-simple-steps-to-live-your-dreams" target="_blank" title="4 Simple Steps to Live Your Dreams | SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">pursued your dreams</a>, and you worked hard to get there&mdash;the farming culture kind of does that. I want my children to pursue their dreams, and I want them to know that you can overcome whatever is put in front of you.&rdquo;

As a small crowd gathered by a closed runway at a little airport outside Dallas, 40-something father of five Lane Segerstrom did an unlikely

As a small crowd gathered by a closed runway at a little airport outside Dallas, 40-something father of five Lane Segerstrom did an unlikely | SUCCESS

How One Entrepreneur Is Harvesting Hope

How One Entrepreneur Is Harvesting Hope | SUCCESS

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<div>A sense of urgency ripples Gary Vaynerchuk&rsquo;s raspy New Jersey-accented voice. The 38-year-old self-made social media marketer is sitting at an office table, looking intently into a video camera as if you, the viewer, are seated directly across from him. This is important, his demeanor signals.</div>Before we get to what he has to say, know that Vaynerchuk&rsquo;s wisdom commands five figures for speeches and has brought his VaynerMedia digital consulting agency big clients, including General Electric and PepsiCo.Vaynerchuk is a social media savant who has loudly extolled its virtues for years. Every day, every week, he says, you must engage with your social media fans through stories that may make them giggle or possibly educate them about your business (which initially for him was selling wine). Otherwise, you&rsquo;re being drowned out by the massive volume of content and ads put out by competitors, media companies and more.This particular video rant, as he calls it, is destined for his YouTube channel and <a href="https://garyvaynerchuk.com/about/" target="_blank" title="About Gary Vaynerchuk | GaryVaynerchuk.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">GaryVaynerchuk.com</a> audiences. To be relevant in society today, you must produce content that engages your fan base, says the native of Babruysk, U.S.S.R. (now Belarus), who grew up in Jersey. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;re not putting out stories, you basically don&rsquo;t exist.&rdquo; To emphasize the point, he bangs his fist on the table. Then he pulls off a tennis shoe and bangs it on the table three times (&ldquo;Khrushchev-style, since I&rsquo;m Russian&rdquo;) to drive home this point: &ldquo;Every one of you is a media company.&rdquo;If you don&rsquo;t understand his message&mdash;that giving away wisdom, laughs or other value to fans on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SUCCESSmagazine" target="_blank" title="SUCCESS Magazine | Facebook.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/successmagazine" target="_blank" title="SUCCESS magazine | Twitter.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://instagram.com/successmagazine#" target="_blank" title="successmagazine | Instagram.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Instagram</a> and elsewhere will pay off later by guilting fans into buying your stuff&mdash;then Vaynerchuk has bad news. His normally fast-paced speech slows: &ldquo;You&hellip; will&hellip; be&hellip; left&hellip; out&hellip; in&hellip; the&hellip; cold. You will be Blockbuster Video. You will be the person who owned a ton of horses before the car&hellip;&rdquo;Vaynerchuk has a name for his four-step technique&mdash;<a href="https://store.success.com/most-popular/jab-jab-jab-right-hook-how-to-tell-your-story-in-a-noisy-social-world-by-gary-vaynerchuk.html" target="_blank" title="Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook | Store.SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">jab, jab, jab, right hook, a boxing reference that is the title of his latest HarperCollins book</a>. It means give, give, give, then ask. Don&rsquo;t make the mistake of always bragging or trying to sell your stuff on Facebook and Twitter and the like. Think of social media as you would a conversation in a bar or social setting: Aim to entertain or engage. Don&rsquo;t straight out ask for a date or sale. When you jab, the key is to NOT expect something in return.Vaynerchuk&rsquo;s unrelenting approach has won him steadfast fans among some of America&rsquo;s biggest corporations. Beth Comstock, GE vice president and chief marketing officer, says Vaynerchuk has an &ldquo;unrelenting focus on what is going to work.&rdquo; He was &ldquo;incredibly quick&rdquo; to see the potential for brands to engage with customers on Vine, a now year-old mobile app that lets users create and post six-second video clips.So GE, on his advice, launched its first tiny video the day after Vine debuted. An early <a href="https://adage.com/article/creativity-pick-of-the-day/general-electric-hosts-a-6secondscience-fair-vine/243552/" target="_blank" title="General Electric Hosts a 6-Second Science Fair on Vine | AdAge.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">GE video that really caught on was a simple science experiment showing fans what happens when you combine milk, food coloring and dish soap</a>&mdash;&ldquo;hardly a costly production,&rdquo; Comstock says&mdash;which has been shared more than 170,000 times. &ldquo;Incredible,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;We credit Gary&rsquo;s tremendous feel for emerging platforms for getting us there.&rdquo;Vaynerchuk&rsquo;s strategies are just as relevant for entrepreneurs and small businesses. In a conversation with SUCCESS while driving from New York (he&rsquo;s now a Manhattanite) to a see a client in New Jersey, he says he understands if at first blush you recoil at his jab, jab, jab advice because you&rsquo;re already spending long hours running your business.Yet, until a couple of years ago, he answered every email he received that wasn&rsquo;t spam, as well as every message he received via Twitter. He still answers a substantial number but can&rsquo;t get to every one: &ldquo;Eventually the math caught up with me.&rdquo;Today, he occasionally asks his million followers: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/gary-vaynerchuk-sent-me-a-bacon-cheeseburger" target="_blank" title="&quot;Gary Vaynerchuk Sent Me a Bacon Cheeseburger!&quot; | SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">&ldquo;Is there anything I can do for you?&rdquo;</a> And when he shares a link to a blog post he&rsquo;s written, he is known to include a message: &ldquo;A very important 3 minute read&mdash;your thoughts?&rdquo; People flood him with&nbsp;replies.While he recognizes everyone is short on time, Vaynerchuk&mdash;whom Bloomberg Businessweek considers among the <a href="https://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/08/0821_twitter_for_entrepreneurs/20.htm" target="_blank" title="Twitter for Entrepreneurs | Businessweek.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Top 20 people every entrepreneur should follow on Twitter</a> (along with Virgin conglomerate head <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/the-bad-boy-of-business-wants-you-to-be-good" target="_blank" title="The Bad Boy of Business Wants You to Be Good | SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Richard Branson</a>)&mdash;thinks it&rsquo;s worth the effort. The ideal is for everyone to answer every email and tweet.&ldquo;I get why this stuff doesn&rsquo;t sound attractive,&rdquo; Vaynerchuk says, suggesting this statement be boldfaced for emphasis. &ldquo;I get why, if you&rsquo;re a small business, that the idea of spending an hour on Twitter just replying to randomness doesn&rsquo;t make sense. I also want everybody who reads this article to know that I am a businessman and I want to sell first, and that the long-term value of those customers is incredibly important to one&rsquo;s business.&rdquo;To him, Yellow Pages ads and TV commercials don&rsquo;t make sense. They&rsquo;re like flushing cash down the toilet. Better to engage with people by spending time on free tools: Twitter and Facebook are musts for small businesses, he thinks, while B-to-B outfits may benefit from <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/linkedin-lesson" target="_blank" title="LinkedIn Lesson | SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">LinkedIn</a> and the new blogging platform <a href="https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48" target="_blank" title="Welcome to Medium | Medium.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Medium</a>. When you personally reply to someone on Twitter or say thanks for liking your post, you&rsquo;re giving them effort. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re creating higher emotion. You&rsquo;re setting yourself up even better for the next sale.&ldquo;I&rsquo;d much rather engage with 13 people and one of them feel the effort and become a long-term customer than engage with 700 people short-term and none of them feel it,&rdquo; Vaynerchuk continues. &ldquo;Scale is attractive, but doesn&rsquo;t necessarily reflect the depth of the relationship or the business that you&rsquo;re going to get.&rdquo; Too many people &ldquo;are just doing the yin; you need a little yang.&rdquo;If you ignore social media or spend little time with it in 2014, it will set you up for trouble later as proliferating social media platforms further disrupt the already massively changed advertising and media landscape. It&rsquo;s time to learn to engage effectively with content tailored specifically to each platform, whether Facebook or Pinterest, Tumblr and others. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m just worried [that] by not doing it at all, or very lightweight, what that exposes you to in relevance in 2016, which comes quick. Got it?&rdquo; Vaynerchuk says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s insurance, right? Like, life insurance is actually about death. But there&rsquo;s actually a pretty good reason to do&nbsp;it.&rdquo;You can farm out social media to an intern or agency&mdash;but that person has to be good. &ldquo;The problem is everybody just assumes that if you&rsquo;re 22, you can do this, which is ludicrous.&rdquo;When should you communicate via social media? There is no perfect formula, in Vaynerchuk&rsquo;s view. Maybe you&rsquo;ll find that you should post to your Facebook fans in early morning before they start work and again at lunchtime. &ldquo;A story is at its best when it&rsquo;s not intrusive, when it brings value to a platform&rsquo;s consumers and when it fits in as a natural step along the customer&rsquo;s path to making a purchase,&rdquo; he writes in <a href="https://store.success.com/most-popular/jab-jab-jab-right-hook-how-to-tell-your-story-in-a-noisy-social-world-by-gary-vaynerchuk.html" target="_blank" title="Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook | Store.SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World</a>. Realistically, he tells SUCCESS, time constraints will dictate what you do: &ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s like working out, right? You got to find out what works for you. Some people work out in the morning; some people work out at night.&rdquo;Vaynerchuk does it as opportunities arise, such as &ldquo;literally even walking down the hallway to go to the bathroom. It&rsquo;s scheduled for every crack within my calendar in an 18-hour day.&rdquo;First and foremost a businessman, Vaynerchuk wasn&rsquo;t always a social media darling. His intent has always been about selling. He sometimes says he got his start in sales by selling lemonade, managing seven lemonade stands across his Edison, N.J., neighborhood as an 8-year-old. But it goes back further.&ldquo;My first business was really at 4&frac12;. I used to go to people&rsquo;s yards, rip their flowers out of their yard, ring the doorbell and sell it back to them,&rdquo; Vaynerchuk says in a speech, eliciting audience laughter (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOMPU___lQk" target="_blank" title="Don't Be This Guy | YouTube.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">a clip is on YouTube</a>). He sold baseball cards at 12. As a teen, he worked at his dad&rsquo;s liquor store but found only wine interesting, so he later started WineLibrary.com, growing the family business through email.But he didn&rsquo;t start on his path to fame until he took a Flipcam and started Wine Library TV on YouTube in 2006 to share his wine wisdom by sampling wines on camera and spitting into a New York Jets bucket every day for the next 5&frac12; years. &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t long before 100,000 people were watching my videos every day (shout-out to my Vayniacs&mdash;love you guys),&rdquo; states GaryVaynerchuk.com. Chalk it up to what New York magazine described as his &ldquo;unpretentious, gonzo approach to wine appreciation.&rdquo;So what if the spare videos &ldquo;had all the production values of a hostage video,&rdquo; as The New York Times put it. He got calls to appear on talk shows such as Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, where <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExI_t3MSEK8" target="_blank" title="Gary Vaynerchuk and Ellen wine tasting | YouTube.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">he set about to train Ellen&rsquo;s palate by having her nibble potato skins and lick a rock</a> before trying a $13 Pinot Grigio that he said had subtle flavors of bluestone and saltwater with a little potato skin action. &ldquo;I never heard of anyone to describe wine with any kind of rock or potato skin,&rdquo; Ellen said, playing along and soon licking leather and eating cherry juice-soaked cotton candy before trying other wines. She eventually drew the line.&ldquo;Gary is going to make me eat what looks like dirt,&rdquo; Ellen grimaced as Vaynerchuk put in his mouth a concoction of dirt, cherries and crumpled cigar. &ldquo;Anything,&rdquo; she quipped, &ldquo;is going to taste good after that.&rdquo; (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L2W2JdrO1Q" target="_blank" title="Gary Vaynerchuk and Ellen wine tasting - Recap | YouTube.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Her producer did eat it</a>, earning the show&rsquo;s first Employee of the Month honor.)Wine has taken a back seat since Vaynerchuk and his brother AJ opened VaynerMedia in 2009 to help clients as large as Del Monte build audiences on social media. Social media is a marathon in their view, not a sprint.&ldquo;I have bad news: Marketing is hard, and it keeps getting harder,&rdquo; Vaynerchuk writes, noting that days before his book deadline, Instagram launched a 15-second video product that competes with Vine, further changing the landscape. &ldquo;But there&rsquo;s no time to mourn the past or to feel sorry for ourselves, and there&rsquo;s no point in self-pity anyway. It is our job as modern-day storytellers to adjust to the realities of the marketplace, because it sure as hell isn&rsquo;t going to slow down for us.&rdquo;<hr /><a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/gary-vaynerchuk-great-content-doesnt-make-demands-often" target="_self" title="Great Content Doesn't Make Demands--Often | SUCCESS.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Read an exclusive excerpt from Gary Vaynerchuk&#39;s new book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy, Social World. </a>

A sense of urgency ripples Gary Vaynerchuk&rsquo;s raspy New Jersey-accented voice. The 38-year-old self-made social media marketer is sitting at an

A sense of urgency ripples Gary Vaynerchuk&rsquo;s raspy New Jersey-accented voice. The 38-year-old self-made social media marketer is sitting at an | SUCCESS

The 4-Step Formula to Making Money through Social Media

The 4-Step Formula to Making Money through Social Media | SUCCESS

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Great family businesses share certain traits: loyalty among the team, vigilance and competitiveness in their fields. Those that pass successfully from one generation to the next have a sense of cohesion because, deep down, family members really do care about each other and they can get through the hard times. They&rsquo;ve found ways to manage confl ict&mdash;not always resolve it, but manage it. They&rsquo;ve also figured out ways to make decisions when there are differences of opinion. Yet, real pitfalls lurk.

	The biggest challenge is being insulated from the outside world says Ted Clark, executive director, Center for Family Business at Northeastern University. Another is the boundary issue&mdash;mixing up family and business, so they&rsquo;re making business decisions based on family issues and vice versa, says family-business consultant Jane Hilburt-Davis, president of Boston-based Key Resources.

	The payoff for family businesses that can make it, though, can be great. &ldquo;When a family business works well, you can&rsquo;t beat it,&rdquo; says Northeastern&rsquo;s Clark, who considers publicly traded corporations at a disadvantage due to their short-term horizons. Family businesses &ldquo;pull together for the right reasons, and it&rsquo;s not a 13-week [profit] payoff. It&rsquo;s for the good of the family. It&rsquo;s good the employees, it&rsquo;s good for the community, and it&rsquo;s long-term. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really hard to compete against them. You think about a business that is saying: I&rsquo;m going to take my payoff next year, or I&rsquo;m going to take my payoff in the next generation.&rdquo;

	So how to avoid the pitfalls? Here are some keys:

	REMEMBER: YOU HAVE TWO EARS AND ONE MOUTH.

	Use them proportionately, says family-business consultant Paul Karofsky. He was a third-generation CEO of his family&rsquo;s wallpaper business before he sold it and eventually helped launch Northeastern University&rsquo;s Center for Family Business. Communication is essential, he and other experts say. While close family members tend to have insights into each other&rsquo;s thinking that wouldn&rsquo;t exist among business partners who aren&rsquo;t related, it&rsquo;s essential they hear each other out on business matters, rather than assuming they know each other&rsquo;s views.

	&ldquo;Really, the lesson is: Enhance your listening skills. Employ active listening techniques,&rdquo; says Karofsky, now principal of Transition Consulting Group in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and a Family Firm Institute board member.

	During conversations, our energy tends to be mainly focused on ourselves and our own responses instead of understanding what the other person is actually saying, Karofsky says. &ldquo;But what we need to say is: It&rsquo;s OK to take time out. It&rsquo;s OK to listen. That, to me, is absolutely vital.&rdquo;

	FIGHT INSULATION BY SEEKING COUNSEL FROM AN ADVISORY BOARD OF EXPERTS.

	&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think you can name one long-term successful family business&mdash; and by successful, I mean of any substance&mdash;that&rsquo;s had longevity and not used an advisory board,&rdquo; Clark says. &ldquo;You need an outside perspective. That&rsquo;s the common pitfall.&rdquo;

	No golf buddies, not your attorney, not your accountant&mdash;they don&rsquo;t belong on the advisory board. (You&rsquo;re already paying the latter two for advice, Karofsky says. Plus, they&rsquo;re never going to recommend firing themselves.)

	Think of the critical success factors for your company, and then choose impartial experts in those areas to be on your advisory board, Karofsky says. Example: You run a restaurant. One critical success factor is food; others are government regulation, marketing and location (real estate). &ldquo;Once you get a handle on critical success factors, you then go seek the best and the brightest who have the knowledge, skill and experience in those arenas,&rdquo; Karofsky says.

	The advisory board adds knowledge, skill and experience that go above and beyond the family members. You need people who will tell the truth because they have nothing to lose. &ldquo;Otherwise, you get in a situation where the king has no clothes. Everyone&rsquo;s afraid to tell the truth because they don&rsquo;t want to cut off the gravy train,&rdquo; Clark says. &ldquo;You need to have people around you who you can trust to tell you what&rsquo;s in your best interest, not theirs.&rdquo;

	Usually advisory board members are paid for their time. Karofsky recommends a prorated amount equivalent to the CEO&rsquo;s salary.

	CREATE A STRATEGIC PLAN.

	Strategic planning means creating a plan of action which, Hilburt-Davis says, should envision such issues as: Where is the business going? What are the goals? How will we get there? Who will do what? What are the time lines?

	Strategic planning is especially critical for when there&rsquo;s a transition of leadership because, Karofsky says, &ldquo;if you don&rsquo;t know where the business is going, how do you know what&rsquo;s expected of the next leader to get it there?&rdquo;

	MANAGE CONFLICT BY DOING THIS...

	A certain amount of conflict is healthy. Businesses need diverse opinions. The trick is to manage conflict. And you can manage it, Karofsky says, by managing expectations. There are two key pieces to this: 1) Anticipate someone else&rsquo;s reaction. If you&rsquo;re unable to anticipate someone else&rsquo;s reaction before you say something that may be volatile or testy, then don&rsquo;t just come out with it. 2) Anticipate the consequences. &ldquo;I think we then move to try to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. Hopefully,&rdquo; Karofsky says, &ldquo;we can minimize conflict.&rdquo;

	In family businesses, &ldquo;the relationships are more tender and deeper and the consequences are greater,&rdquo; he says. For instance, if you&rsquo;re rude to someone in the supermarket or in another car on the highway, that&rsquo;s one thing, but if you&rsquo;re rude to your sister, she&rsquo;s hurt. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s much more at stake. The consequences are greater.&rdquo;

	RESIST THE URGE TO RUSH TO A SOLUTION.

	Does this describe you? Every time you see a problem, you try to solve it instantly. Resist that urge, Karofsky says. Instead, try to figure out what&rsquo;s really going on. When you hear about a problem, think, What caused that? Then, what caused that? Keep peeling back by trying to understand the cause. Then explore the options and talk about solutions. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like peeling back an onion,&rdquo; Karofsky says, &ldquo;trying to get to the depth and the substance, the core.&rdquo;

	COALESCE AS A FAMILY, SUCH AS BY TELLING STORIES AT PERIODIC FAMILY MEETINGS.

	Stories of current and past generations are the way to get the message through to the younger generation about values, Karofsky says.

	He often told his kids about March 1, 1959: &ldquo;I woke up in the morning, and my house was quieter than usual when I came downstairs. My mom told me that my dad&rsquo;s business had burned to the ground in the middle of the night. It was a five alarm fire. We all got in the car and went down to see what was going on,&rdquo; says Karofsky, then 16.

	His dad was already there. The teen ran up to fi nd his father standing across the street from the fire and jotting notes on a clipboard. &ldquo;What are you doing?&rdquo; young Karofsky asked. &ldquo;Making plans to order four 40-foot trailers fi lled with wallpaper to fill the warehouse on Wednesday,&rdquo; his dad replied. &ldquo;But it burned down,&rdquo; the surprised teen noted. &ldquo;Well, today is Sunday. I&rsquo;ll have a new location by Wednesday. And when they&rsquo;re on the road, I&rsquo;ll call them and tell them where to deliver it,&rdquo; came the reply, as Karofsky recalls.

	And so it was that the Northeastern Wallpaper Corp. in Boston got a new home on Tuesday, and the teen would grow up to work there for more than 20 years, ultimately as CEO. Moral: Instead of issuing dry commandments, tell stories. &ldquo;I can tell my grandchildren to plan, or I can tell them that story,&rdquo; Karofsky says. &ldquo;The story is indelible&hellip;. That&rsquo;s how you get the message through about planning.&rdquo;

	REALIZE THE KEY FACTORS IN A GOOD FAMILY BUSINESS ARE&hellip; GOOD BUSINESS FACTORS.

	A family business that&rsquo;s successful long term has a board of advisors and a board of directors, Clark says. They communicate the goals of the family and the goals of the business, and they run the business like a business.

	Tell the truth. It&rsquo;s easier to remember, says Karofsky, who considers it one of his top essentials for a successful family business.

	A major challenge in coalescing as a family is figuring out how to minimize the next generation&rsquo;s sense of entitlement&mdash;&ldquo;a brutal epidemic in this country today,&rdquo; Karofsky says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s critical to help try to minimize that. We need to talk about it and help our kids understand that even though we&rsquo;ve given them a lot, it&rsquo;s their turn to take over and their turn to earn.&rdquo;

	One strategy: Don&rsquo;t simply give the business to the next generation. It&rsquo;s &ldquo;very important&rdquo; the transfer involve a combination of a purchase by the younger generation and a gift, he says. &ldquo;There are two kinds of ownership&mdash;there&rsquo;s a material ownership and there&rsquo;s an emotional ownership. Emotional ownership can come in a far deeper sense,&rdquo; Karofsky says, &ldquo;when it&rsquo;s earned.&rdquo;

	At Reynolds&rsquo; Garage &amp; Marine, which recently turned 150, fifthgeneration president Gary Reynolds says one secret to his company&rsquo;s longevity from its 1859 origins of building carriages to today selling and repairing cars in Lyme, Conn., is this: Each successive generation has had to buy the company from the previous one.

	&ldquo;Not that my father or any of the rest of them didn&rsquo;t give or help me do part of it. But it was a transaction, not a gift,&rdquo; says Reynolds, 65, whose three children work at the garage. &ldquo;I paid my father $2,412.55 a month for more months than I care to admit. I think that&rsquo;s a reason that it&rsquo;s worked&mdash;at least you have to work for it.&rdquo;

Great family businesses share certain traits: loyalty among the team, vigilance and comp

Great family businesses share certain traits: loyalty among the team, vigilance and comp | SUCCESS

It's a Family Business

It&#8217;s a Family Business

It's a Family Business | SUCCESS

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