June Second Sunday Series Newsletter: Self-Made Millionaires
On the second Sunday of every month, An Empowered Woman hosts a brunch at the Mountaingate Country Club in Los Angeles. On June 8, women came together to celebrate "self-made millionaires." An Empowered Woman is about women empowering each other through sharing their personal stories, challenges, and victories. Desiree Doubrox, the organization's founder, opened the afternoon by talking about all of the benefits of membership, including access to the Take Five Radio Show and Empowered TV, both powerful networking opportunities.
Another membership benefit is the Telebook Club, hosted by Laurie Hacking, a certified life coach. It meets once a month, is free to all members, and has women all over the country participating. This month, they are discussing The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch, written by a professor who, after finding out that he had a terminal illness, wanted to write down his "last lecture."
Bobi Leonard, the afternoon's first speaker, grew up dirt poor in the Caribbean. She came to Los Angeles to attend UCLA, where she was pre-med because she wanted to make money and she knew that doctors made good money. However, she soon realized that something wasn't right; she wasn't following her heart's passion. She started working at a small interior design studio and fell in love. She opened her first design store in a "low rent" Los Angeles neighborhood. Years later, she had opened several stores and was hugely successful. She confessed, "I'm not entirely sure how it all happened." She insists that the key to success is commitment, love of your work, and balance in your life. She also stressed the importance of listening and being open to new opportunities, tenacity, giving back, and finding a good mentor.
In fact, she has a wonderful personal story about the power of tenacity. One of her dreams was to build a building. She spent years saving up the money to do so. The day construction was scheduled to begin, the city told her that she couldn't build on that lot because they had plans for a moratorium. She spent days going through every law she could find until she found a loophole: anyone who puts a tent on a property for one year can then build a building there. To this day, she says that people still talk about her circus tent, which of course was replaced with her building in one year's time.
The next speaker was Norma Siley. She was also from a tropical island: Jamaica. She had tried many business ventures over the years, and she said that while some people regarded this as "failing," she saw it as always moving forward and never giving up. She believes that success comes to those that are always ready to get up and go and make things happen for themselves.
After working as a nurse, she created a home health care service. Her motto is "the home: the hospital of the future." She says that if you want to be successful, you must operate your business with integrity. Also, don't stay stuck in one place. Always be asking yourself, "What's the next best thing that I can do with the skills, talent, and experience that I have?"
Norma is a single mother and her son is her "why." She wants him to grow up knowing that he can do anything, so she works hard every day to be a good role model for him. She knows that when you are passionate about something, "quitting is not an option."
The last speaker was Jodie Davis, and her story is truly amazing. Her parents divorced when she was fifteen, and so, growing up with not much, she struggled just to finish high school. She then got a job at a hospital training doctors in new technologies (they never asked her age when she was hired and were later shocked to find out that she was only eighteen).
Jodie took her first vacation ever to Santa Barbara and fell so much in love with it that she left everything behind and moved there with practically nothing. She got a job filling in as a receptionist for a woman on maternity leave. The husband of her boss ended up offering her a job in bank loans. At this job, she gained a lot of knowledge of how finance in business works. She was able to help a client create a business plan that tripled the value of his business in four years.
The man who ran the staffing company that supplied the employees for this business offered her a position as manager. She accepted, and her first order of business was to figure out why this successful company was not profitable. She learned that the owner was paying himself too much and she decided that he no longer had control of the bank accounts. Once she started handling the accounts herself, she saw that he had been kiting money from one account to another. Through her tenacity, she was able to get the company to operate legitimately - and she still doubled the amount of money coming in! After a few years, she knew that she had to part ways with this owner, and they divided the business. Even only managing half of what she had before, she still made her company more profitable than it had ever been.
Jodie's advice is to always have goals and to keep saving towards them. When she was a teenager, she saved enough money to buy a car. That was the experience that taught her how to discipline herself to achieve her bigger goals. If there is one thing that she is still trying to accomplish, it's becoming more feminine, as her experiences in the business world have made her very driven in a masculine way. She now knows that there is more to her as a woman than her business success.
During her question and answer period, she inspired one woman enough to ask, "Will you be my mentor?"
All three speakers emphasized the importance of finding a good business mentor. An Empowered Woman shares that spirit because it is all about women helping each other. There are many membership benefits, including mastermind meetings and the telebook club. If you are thinking about becoming a member, the price is going up to $225 (which includes everything except Second Sunday) so it's important to act quickly.
The afternoon closed with the traditional Second Sunday drawing, during which women give away products and services raffle-style.
For more information on this wonderful organization, visit http://www.anempoweredwoman.com/.
Article written by C. Elizabeth Peters (www.celizabethpeters.com)
