Julia Pimsleur - Million Dollar Women: Raise Capital and Take Your Business Further, Faster

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Names and identifying characteristics of investors, and board members, and certain others, whether or not so noted in the text, have been changed.

Copyright 2015 by Julia Pimsleur

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2015

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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui

Illustrations by Heather Willems/ImageThink

Jacket design by Evan Gaffney

Author photograph Jean Luc Mege

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pimsleur, Julia.

Million dollar women : the essential guide for female entrepreneurs who want to go big / Julia Pimsleur.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Women-owned business enterprises. 2. New business enterprises. 3. Fund raising. I. Title.

HD2341.P5197 2015

658.409082dc23

2015011025

ISBN 978-1-4767-9029-9

ISBN 978-1-4767-9032-9 (ebook)

To My Mother. And All the Women Who Dared.

BECOME A MILLION DOLLAR WOMAN

That is a good question. Ill have to get back to you on that, I answered with as much confidence as I could feign. I knew what my margins were. Were gross margins the same thing? Or was that something different? I certainly couldnt ask Jeff. I wasnt sure I had the skills or the swagger to get through this meeting, nor the dozens like it I had coming up. But I knew that if I wanted to get my business funded I had better figure it out, and fast.

Needing money for your business and not knowing how to get it is a situation women are facing in increasing numbers. Over the past twenty years, American women started close to twice as many businesses as men, By comparison, 6 percent of businesses founded by men make over $1 million in revenues. Most women entrepreneurs are running kitchen-table businesses, just getting by or, worse, running out of cash and shutting down. When my company passed the $1 million mark a few years ago, I got a call from a journalist who wanted to profile me along with other women whose businesses were making high revenues. I was partly flattered, but I was mainly stunned. Why are so few women running businesses that make bank? I decided to find out and to help push that 3 percent number into the double digits. The year after I got that call, I raised $2.1 million in venture capital, exceeded our prior year sales by 85 percent, and on weekends started teaching other women how to raise angel and venture capital in my conference room.

Recent books written for women who want to excel professionally, like Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In and Mika Brzezinskis Knowing Your Value , offer road maps for women in corporate America to ascend to the corner office. Now its time to meet women who, instead of leaning in, simply left corporate America (or never entered) and marched in to the world of entrepreneurship. They have raised capital, developed powerful networks, and generated multimillion-dollar companies from scratch. We are the Million Dollar Women, and I will show you how to become one of us.

I say us because, after meeting with dozens of Jeffs (and very few Janes), I learned the fundraising dance and raised $2.1 million in venture capital, which enabled me to turn my small business into one with multimillion-dollar revenues. When I started Little Pim, a company that produces a program for young children to learn a foreign language at home, I wanted to create an exceptional language-learning experience for young children. I knew it could be more than a lifestyle business, but I wasnt sure how big I could take it. At one point I hit a wall and even considered shutting down. Instead I doubled down on my dream. I realized that I had to think and behave differently in order to become the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company.

To get my business to start producing different results, I had to change my mindset, get new skills, and raise capital. I had to seek out experts and coaches who could help me tackle my greatest fears and help me evolve from a creative person with a business idea into a CEO running a business with a creative idea at the center of it. Million Dollar Women will give you a mirror to look at your own mindset and skills and will help you accelerate the process of taking your business past the million-dollar milestone.

When I was trying to get to $1 million in revenues, I wished I could have learned from women who knew what it took. I have worked with incredible advisors, coaches, and mentorsand just about all of them are men. I knew there had to be women out there building big companies, but I rarely read about them in the press and didnt have access to any million dollar women to ask how I could get there too.

Despite all the media hype around entrepreneurship, the only women entrepreneurs most people can name are Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. They may also know of Sara Blakely, whose Spanx undergarment empire made her one of the wealthiest women in America. Then its usually Um... who else? I believe the one thing we can all do to help women get farther faster is to share our stories so that we can help our entrepreneurial sisters think bigand learn from one anothers milestones and mistakes.

In that spirit, I am delighted to introduce you to inspiring women from across America who run successful companies they built from scratch. The entrepreneurs in the sidebars of these pages are not yet featured in Forbes Most Powerful Women . These are stories of women who are five or ten years into their journey as successful business owners. They are not that far ahead of you on the hike up the entrepreneurial mountain, and you can learn from their every move. We are at what I like to call Mount Everest Base Camp. A tiny percentage of hikers who set out to climb to the top of Everest, which is at an altitude of 29,000 feet, actually make it. Most never even make it to Base Camp, at 18,000 feet. It is widely documented that 50 percent of all new businesses fail within the first five years. Getting to Base Camp is a huge achievement. Its a staging ground for the determined, where they can share war stories and get ready for the next part of the climb.