Cathie Black is Back With An Update…and More Great Advice!
August 10th, 2008
Seeds For Success finalists Abby Port of the Red Koala Canvas Co. and Karla Duncan of Head2Toe Publications were next up to have a telephone meeting with Cathie Black, President of Hearst Magazines and a Seeds For Success Mentor from findingwhatmatters.com’s network of experts. It was a thrilling experience for both of these entrepreneurs. Here is Cathie’s report:
This week I spoke with two entrepreneurs, Karla Duncan from Birmingham, Alabama and Abby Port from suburban Atlanta. Both women are so grateful to Yahoo! and Carolyn Kepcher for both the grant and the ongoing advice.
Abby has started a business of personalized canvas art for children’s rooms where the customer can design the actual piece of art herself online. My advice in particular to Abby was to focus on her business plan so that she had a benchmark to measure her progress against and to think smaller so that she can get a track record of success. It seems to me that it is easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up with the big ideas that stimulate other big ideas but then the little details don’t get attended to. We talked a lot about how she can do some simple market research by visiting high end baby boutiques and asking the store managers their opinion on her product ideas as they are the ones closest to the customer. We also discussed the Pottery Barn store for kids and debated whether she could get an entrée there and how to best to that. PB is beginning to offer customization to its customers; this could be a significant area of competition for her. Abby feels that she has a unique program to offer; hopefully that is true. What she should focus on is how to drive traffic to her website, as that is her only method of distribution currently. We talked about ideas for that.
Today I spent time with Karla, who is making big strides with her business. She had been a national sales manager in the past in the special needs area, so she seemed very comfortable with the business aspects of the job. Her products, special learning aids and publications for learning-challenged children, will be manufactured in China, with the first hopefully being available in September. We talked about utilizing the resources of Birmingham both from the women-owned business aspect as well as tapping into the colleges there for both design talent as well as business interns. We even talked about her making contact with business school professors there to see if she might talk to a class and maybe get an MBA student to work with her as an intern perhaps leading to a case study. All for free! We talked about her budget to support herself and making sure that she has adequate funds to get her through the early start-up phase. She is still holding down a full-time job so at least there is income coming in there.
I told both women to give me a call or email in a month or so to check in and evaluate progress.
