Posts Tagged ‘Entrepreneurship’

Dec 2012

I realize that it’s probably a little too meta for me to introduce my own post, so I just want to take this space to thank you all for an amazing year. As you’ll read below, 2012 was incredibly rewarding for me, even if it was super exhausting, and I owe a ton of that to the opportunities provided here at APW. Heck, it’s a still little surreal that I’m even in a position to be writing this intro right now. (Seriously, my sweatpants are riddled with holes, I’m wearing a knit hat inside because our heater is broken, and I still haven’t moved my breakfast plate to the sink today. But here I am. In charge. Terrifying and awesome.) We’ll be back for a shortened week next week, but since this is my last bit of personal writing for the year, please let me raise my coffee mug to all of you (plus Meg in spirit) in a cheers of gratitude. I’ll see you all in a few weeks, perhaps a bit more rested, hopefully with nicer sweats.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

It was almost one year ago today that I pulled my hatchback into the driveway of my new home in California (affectionately referred to as The Pony Farm) for the first time. When I moved here I had barely an idea of where we were living, I had a business that needed to be rebuilt on a new coast, a part-time job with APW, and a few friends that I’d made, ahem, on the internet. For the first time in a long time, life was open and undetermined and new.

And the best part was that this was going to be the year that I was finally free from my cubicle. I would be liberated from bureaucracy and rules and people who told me no. Granted, it was also a little bit scary. All that freedom mostly came with the realization that I didn’t have much on my plate. I hadn’t booked any California weddings yet and working for APW was something that took up just a small part of my time. I tingled with the same nervous excitement and anticipation I felt those first few weeks after graduating college, except this time my fate wasn’t in the hands of grumpy entertainment industry executives.

The kind of freedom I experienced in those first few months was a little like being a kid at a buffet. I didn’t have to make a choice about what I wanted to do next, because I had endless possibilities right in front of me! So like any gluttonous young’n, I decide that I was going to try to have it all. Yes, I really ought to know better by now. But to be honest, it was really exciting. The first few things I poured my heart into (setting up Hart & Sol West and helping Meg get her book tour sponsored by Amtrak) paid off in ways that I had never even dared to imagine. (I got to ride a midnight train to Georgia! I was going to travel for photography! Life goals accomplished!) And it wasn’t long before I wanted more. So each time a project wrapped or a wedding was booked (or frankly, most of the time before the ink was even dry on a current project) I was there, looking for my next opportunity.

The problem was, once I started I Just. Never. Stopped.

Maybe it’s because I graduated into the recession, or because I’ve always had to bust ass to get ahead professionally, but I became kind of addicted to hearing the word yes. This year was the first time in my professional life that I didn’t feel like I was being held back by the man, or by gender politics, or by bullshit office policies, and dammit, I wasn’t about to let that go. (It reminds me a bit of hoarding, but with opportunities. I was afraid if I didn’t take everything that came my way, I’d suddenly be without any opportunities. Which I think might be characteristic of those of us who have tried to find jobs in the recession.) Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: The Year of Yes

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 46 Comments »

Dec 2012

Madeline: The End Is Just The Beginning

Me [via gchat, on writing my last APW post]: eek argh blegh, I’m stuck!

Brandon: You aren’t stuck for short meaningless guttural words

Here’s why this was hard for me to write. As you might expect from someone who’s just spent a year writing for APW (*sniff* can’t believe it’s December), my wedding to Brandon was more than one event, and not just because we staged it several times. Getting married was the two of us setting our sights on a place we wanted to be, then holding hands, closing our eyes, and jumping. The posts I’ve written along the way let me share the terrifying, exhilarating part from when our feet left the floor to the landing. I couldn’t be more grateful for the support, the solidarity, and the Exactlys I’d had from the APW community. But back on the ground again, I’m learning that it’s time to identify the next place I want to be, close my eyes and jump into the unknown once again. It helps—it really helps—to have a husband on my side for this. But it’s not a magic fix. It’s still down to me.

Back to the guttural noises. I promised myself I’d use this final post to check in on a couple of projects I mentioned in my bio, i.e. my first novel and the various Etsy stores that I would one day launch. That was the first step. The second, petrifying step comes now, when, without adding ironic air quotes around any of the words, I tell you that I took my manuscript to a writing conference, and an editor has asked to see it; and that I have recently launched my Etsy store, Modern Mala, selling beaded accessories inspired by Tibetan prayer malas. Did you see what I did there? I went from “manuscript” to manuscript, from “business owner” to business owner. It wasn’t so bad. Continue reading Madeline: The End Is Just The Beginning

Posted in: Planning: Journeys | 11 Comments »

Dec 2012

Married Entrepreneurs

The funny thing about marriage is people will talk to you like they already know the outcome of any given relationship situation. Regardless of what decisions you’re making at the time, folks will either want to confirm that you’re doing things right, or they’ll warn you that you’re doing things wrong. And of course the answer is that nobody knows what the outcome of our marriages will be, not even us. Which is why I find stories like Robin and Jerry’s especially brave. Against the popular narrative, they decided to go into business together, in a country they’d never been to before, and without any idea of how things would turn out, they’ve made it work. Their story reminds me that the future is not pre-determined, but it’s also not totally unknown. It’s something we’re constantly building and moving toward together as a team.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

A foundation of my and Jerry’s relationship has always been that we push each other to pursue our dreams. This has become even stronger since we got married three years ago. We moved to Bogota, Colombia, without knowing anyone here. Jerry pushed me to get back into my passion of map-making, and I’ve encouraged him to pursue leather-working. But by far the biggest dream that we have pursued in 2012 has been starting a company together.

Shortly after moving to Bogota, we started taking leather-working classes at a workshop down the street. It didn’t take long for us to fall in love with the craft and the people there. Soon thereafter, we decided to start Restrepo Leather to bring these beautiful leather bags to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Common wisdom these days says that you shouldn’t get into business with family, perhaps even more so with a spouse. What if problems in business translate to problems in your relationship? Or vice versa? Jerry and I thought for a while about whether starting a business together was the right idea for us, and ultimately made the decision the same way we usually make decisions together: one part careful thought, one part gut feeling, and ten parts trusting each other.

With inspiration from Meg’s series on being an entrepreneur, I thought I’d give y’all some insights on what it’s like to start up a business with your life partner.

There’s nothing sexier than problem-solving together. One of the sexiest things about Jerry is his intellect (other sexy things: he makes me leather bags by hand, his beard). We’re both pretty good at problem-solving on our own, but working together, we usually find holes in each other’s arguments that push us to find an even more elegant solution. Continue reading Married Entrepreneurs

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 16 Comments »

May 2012

Reclaiming Wife: Big Risks for Big Rewards

So it turns out, when we asked you for moving posts last week, there was more this community had to say on the topic than we could possibly imagine. Which makes sense. At this point in most of our lives, we’re in a state of transition, of moving forward. Possibly literally and certainly metaphysically, we’re all in a state of moving. Which isn’t to say this week is about packing boxes. It’s not. It’s about going the distance in a whole variety of ways. So today is in two parts. First, we have a Reclaiming Wife post from Lauren McGlynn (with her adorable Texas courthouse wedding photos) about uprooting her life and her business and moving to Scotland to be with her husband. Then, this afternoon we have Lauren’s amazing Scottish wedding. So let’s dive in. This one has huge lessons for all of us.

The year that Aidan & I got married was one of the craziest years of my life. A timeline of that year goes something like this:

Me: B&B cook and aspiring wedding photographer. Him: Philosophy PhD candidate.

January: Aidan and I are engaged!

February: I photograph my first wedding and I love it.

March: People start booking me to photograph their weddings in the fall. I am thrilled.

April: Aidan and I get married in Texas.

May: Aidan and I get married in Scotland.

June: Aidan stays in Scotland while I move to North Carolina to live on my friend’s blueberry farm in the hopes of picking up some weddings so that we can have some money. I can’t legally work in Scotland and he can’t legally work in the States during the summers.

July: Aidan and I talk on the computer a lot. I photograph more weddings in North Carolina.

August: After two months, neither of us can stand being apart anymore, so Aidan flies to the farm, decides that he can not stand the heat, nor the insects, nor the lack of air conditioning (he is a delicate Scottish flower after all), so we drive back to Texas where it is hotter but there is AC.

September-October: I photograph lots of weddings.

November: I am laid off from my job. My new husband, still living on mere grad student salary, tells me not to look for another job, that I better make this photography thing work. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, I marvel over my good fortune at marrying such a person. I dump more money than I have ever spent on anything into advertising.

December: I start booking weddings like a crazy person.

January: Aidan is offered a Philosophy post doc… in Scotland.

Did you hear that? That record scratch? Is your neck tingling in sympathetic whiplash? Because what’s happening here is that both of our dreams are coming true—ON SEPARATE CONTINENTS.

When I met Aidan he was still a PhD student, and I had recently dropped out of grad school to work at a grocery store. I usually like to dress that up a little to make it sound more respectable by adding that it was a small neighborhood grocery store and that they sold lots of organic cereal and stuff. But whatever: When I met Aidan I was making seven dollars and hour working a mindless job at a lame grocery store. When Aidan finally came through my line, the first thing I did was add “Scottish accent” to the top of my list of sexy man things. After a few months of getting to know each other over brief one-to-three minute checkout line interactions we went out on a date.

A few months later we had a conversation where I asked him how serious he was feeling about our relationship. He made some very serious noises, but then he told me that the future of our relationship depended on me being willing to move wherever he got a job. That might be Canada, that might be the UK, that might be the middle of nowhere Alabama. At the time my career had progressed from grocery store clerk to chopping down trees with a chainsaw then dragging them through a chigger infested desert field as an Americorps volunteer, so I was like: Yeah sure, sounds good to me. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Big Risks for Big Rewards

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 64 Comments »

Mar 2012

Women, Money, and Knowing Our Worth

We over here on the APW team have been thinking seriously about the idea I floated in last week’s entrepreneurship post—how our “real mission is to get people to improve their lives offline (passionate online community is great, but my real goal is to inspire people to change their offline communities).” We’ve been thinking: How do we talk about the change we’re facilitating in our own lives? How do we prompt people to talk about the changes they’ve made because of a post they read, or a conversation they had with someone in the comments, or an in-person discussion they had at an event? Today’s post is our first crack at it. Call it “Practicing Practical,” if you will. This post is from Kathleen, who attended the APW book talk in Atlanta, and she has real constructive advice for how women should deal with money in their day-to-day lives. Because y’all, we’re diving into money this week, and it’s hard. It’s For Richer For Poorer Week, Part I.

I attended the Atlanta book talk, and as Meg’s write up said, this wasn’t a night of wedding talk—it was a night of discussing our value as women, creators, contributors and (for lots of us in that room) business owners. Meg and Leah’s panel was so great, and the questions were even better, but the room felt… unsatisfied. Not finished. And as Leah said, we all needed to keep this conversation going, as there was so. much. there.

So in the spirit of “we are responsible to this community and to keeping this conversation going,” I told Meg as she signed my book that I’d be submitting about this topic, because if that room was any indication, we have a lot to learn from each other, and I want to learn from you all.

I know a little about how to value, position, and negotiate one’s worth, but (obviously) not all. My story is that I’ve had my own pregnancy and postpartum personal training business for the last eight years, and after working my way up the ladder (seriously, starting in 2005 as a contractor working just one hour a week) just negotiated a contract to come on as a partner/owner of a very large specialty fitness company. I’ve also spent the last two years in grad school, and I will graduate with my MBA in April (insert cheers and !!!!). Between owning a personal training business, working my way to partner, and earning my MBA, I’ve learned three big lessons/tools about setting and negotiating my monetary worth. The good thing is that these ideas work if you are negotiating a salary, or a rental fee for a wedding or a prenuptial agreement. (This is the point where I ask for more prenup posts because… yeah.)

1. Anchor: This is the hardest part to get right, and it’s also the most important. The gist is this: whatever number gets said first is where the conversation happens. If you start the conversation at a hundred dollars, you will NEVER get a hundred and one dollars. (And you are pretty likely to get fifty dollars.) If you think you are likely to get fifty, don’t start there—start higher. Anchoring means where the conversation starts is where it’s going to live. If a photographer quotes you $2,000, you probably aren’t going to end up paying them $2,500…or $400. On the other side, if a photographer quotes you $15,000, you probably aren’t going to end up paying them $5,000. Anchoring is the way to set the highest end of a ballpark. The goal is to set it high enough that you still get what you are worth (which, let’s be real, is probably more than you are currently asking for or getting) without killing the conversation or negotiation before it starts. The best way to set a good anchor is to look at: Continue reading Women, Money, and Knowing Our Worth

Posted in: Uncategorized | 173 Comments »

Dec 2011

Working For Yourself: Month Eleven (The Big)

Before we get into what happened yesterday (and we will get into what happened yesterday), I need to talk about this last month. I’ve mentioned before I dove into this first year of self-employment telling myself that my job was exactly the same as it had always been (writing posts, selling ads), but that this year I’d have more time to do it, and I’d also write a book. It turns out, that was sort of a lie.

But there is also this one other *tiny* thing that I’ve been lying to myself about. I’ve been lying to myself about the fact that real live people (lots of them) read my blog. And as with all lies we tell ourselves, sometimes they save our sanity for a little bit, but eventually they fall apart. Sometimes they fall apart in ways that feel hard to grapple with (like most of this month) and sometimes they fall apart in blindingly wonderful ways (like yesterday).

At every step of the blog’s growth, I’ve had some serious growing pains. It turns out that I’m a kind of private person (which is perpetually interesting as a blogger), so I’ve worked to be careful about what parts of myself I put out for public comment. I want to talk, endlessly, about ideas—but I don’t want to talk about or justify, say, how I decorate my home, the day to day of my family life, or deeply personal decisions. So I’ve walked a line with what I share here. Long time readers will remember that (mostly due to my corporate job) I didn’t show a picture of my face for the first year and a half (big reveal here, with a gun). We didn’t share a ton of wedding photos with the internet, and most of the ones I picked to share didn’t even have my face in them (that was not a conscious choice). And over much of my blogging career I’ve posted few enough pictures of me that I spent a year interacting with a long time reader twice a week without him figuring out who I was.

So this year, as the blog has grown, I’ve simply pretended that it’s just this little project I work on from my kitchen table, la-la-la. And this month, that sort of fell apart on me, in all sorts of ways.

It started a few minutes before Amber took this picture of me at Camp Mighty. When I went to Mighty Summit a year ago, I felt like I was in the perfect position. I’d made enough professional headway to get invited, but no one knew who I was (which meant zero expectations). This year, at Camp Mighty, I pretended that it was going to be exactly the same way. It wasn’t. When I walked into the first party, four or five people I didn’t know said hi to me. Still operating in my little self-delusion bubble, I thought, “Hum. I wonder how they know who I am?” (Oh, internet, apparently you go… everywhere?) Then two seconds before this picture was taken, some lovely ladies stopped me and said, “You’re Meg.” And you guys, I’m an idiot. I totally froze. I said, “Yes.” And then they said, “You’re Meg!” again. And I looked super baffled and said, “I totally am….” and then I ran off to take these pictures. That’s grace, kids. (Slams head into the desk.)

And the thing is, I know why I do what I do. It’s about the work, and about getting to write, and about sharing ideas with a whole bunch of smart people, and about getting to run a creative business. And I want it to be about the work, not about me. But this month I realized that’s not going to be the case, all of the time. So negotiating that has been tricky for me. Finding the real goodness in a bigger platform has been hard at some moments this month, but yesterday that goodness became breathtakingly clear.

Holy crap yesterday. Yesterday, when you guys single handedly pushed up The APW Book to #29 on Amazon US, and #77 on Amazon Canada. Yesterday, which was the most awe inspiring day of my professional life. Yesterday, when I got a feeling for what the APW community actually is, and for what it can be. Yesterday. I am so grateful. And overwhelmed. And kind of hung over. And grateful. And in awe.

Clearly, I have not wrapped words around all of this yet. So I thought I’d wrap words around what I learned, instead. Yesterday taught me a variation of the lesson I’ve learned over and over again all year, and the whole time I was trying to sell the book: You can’t succeed without being willing to fail with full force. You can’t figure out how far you can go, until you push yourself so far that you risk completely falling on your face. And seriously? This never stops sucking, don’t kid yourself. Continue reading Working For Yourself: Month Eleven (The Big)

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Meg's Thoughts | 105 Comments »