Making Mistakes for Fun and Profit

Yesterday, I spoke at the Women’s Leadership Exchange Conference in Tempe, Arizona. The keynote speaker was Poppy King, better known as The Lipstick Queen. She recently came out with a book detailing her adventures as an entrepreneur. Adventures are what she sure has had. Poppy founded her original company when she was 18 years old. She built it into a multi-million dollar business and then she lost it. After a corporate stint, she has now started a new business where she’s focused on avoiding the mistakes that she made with the first. The good news is that it seems to be working and her new business is well on its way to being a success.

As the keynote speaker, Poppy shared some of her lessons. She started off by saying what it means to be a ceo -- having a vision and making mistakes. And she then went on to say that being a leader is all about learning from your mistakes. Just that simple.

Poppy hit it right on the head.

When I was running Dreamlife, Fred Rosen (the former chairman of Ticketmaster and all-around tough guy) told me that my job as ceo was to make 100 decisions a day. He said that on day one, I should be happy to get 50% right, and that as the days went on my batting average should go up. His point was that as head of the company I had to keep making decisions even if some of them -- a lot of them, even -- were wrong. It was the only way to keep moving forward. And the way to get my batting average up was to learn from the mistakes. After all, he said, iron isn’t made with sand, it’s made with fire.

It’s a bit of wisdom I was glad to be reminded of.

Comments

[Ora]

People should read this.

[Theresa]

Hello Beth, I have been reading your ezine I received by email. I have a question for you. I have been trying to think of a small business that I could start up. My latest Big Idea is a spring water bottling company. After acquiring the raw property, I would have to drill a well, construct a bottling plant/warehouse to bottle the water and make it available for shipping. Or would it be better to fill tanks to be bottled at another facility? I would do the back office work and hire out the heavy lifting, but I need some expert guidance to make sure I am working in the right direction. I would like to establish a contract with a retailer, such as SuperAmerica (Speedway) or Nestle, so I would provide the spring water for their label and they would do the retailing portion of distribution.
Beth, my question is: How much production do I need to plan for to be attractive to a major retailer or distributor? Whatever guidance you can provide will be appreciated. I don’t know where to start researching this.

[Theresa]

Hello Beth, I have been reading your ezine I received by email. I have a question for you. I have been trying to think of a small business that I could start up. My latest Big Idea is a spring water bottling company. After acquiring the raw property, I would have to drill a well, construct a bottling plant/warehouse to bottle the water and make it available for shipping. Or would it be better to fill tanks to be bottled at another facility? I would do the back office work and hire out the heavy lifting, but I need some expert guidance to make sure I am working in the right direction. I would like to establish a contract with a retailer, such as SuperAmerica (Speedway) or Nestle, so I would provide the spring water for their label and they would do the retailing portion of distribution.
Beth, my question is: How much production do I need to plan for to be attractive to a major retailer or distributor? Whatever guidance you can provide will be appreciated. I don’t know where to start researching this.