Susanne 6. Please tell us about your life and business philosophy in general.
My philosophy–in its simplest form–is “have a great life and talk about it.” I decided long ago to make myself a guinea pig and experiment with ideas before passing them along in my writing and teaching. I consider myself a card-carrying dream builder and my greatest joy is helping others go for their own dreams.
7. You are a bestselling author of the book “Making a Living Without a Job”. Tell us more about that book.
Making a Living Wihtout a Job was first a seminar which was enormously popular–still is–that put together my ideas about being creatively self-employed. When it went into book form, I wanted to write a manual that wasn’t just about getting started, but also about keeping going. It really was meant to free the corporate slaves by exposing them to a different way of working and thinking about their own lives.
8. What about your most recent book “Jump Start Your Entrepreneurial Spirit”?
Jumpstart Your Entrepreneurial Spirit is a collection of 52 short essays about all sorts of things appropriate to the entrepreneurial life. It includes lots of the intangibles things that make for success and lots of stories about people that inspire me.
9. Please tell us about your ” Winning Ways” newsletter and the tele-classes and seminars you offer?
One of the most critical things for anyone wanting to succeed at self-employment is to have steady reinforcement. A newsletter does that beautifully and also gives me a format to share new business ideas, books, and stories from my seminar students. Winning Ways comes out six times a year and is great fun to write. I’ll be starting my 19th year of publication, which is a longevity record for small business newsletters. While I still do short seminars that include the ones you’ve mentioned and another called Establish Yourself as an Expert, this past year I’ve been moving to longer events, which I love. Here in Minnesota I do one called Camp Entrepreneur. Nick and I also do an event in Las Vegas called Being an Inspired Entrepreneur and another in the Lake District in the UK called Building the Possible Dream. I’m quite smitten with all the longer events and plan to do more of them in the future.
10. For a while now you have been involved in building a business across international frontiers. Please tell us more about your newest initiative – Dreambuilders.
One of the interesting challenges I’ve been dealing with for the past couple of years is learning how to work with a business partner who lives 4,000 miles away. While e-mail and the telephone make it easy to stay in touch, Nick Williams and I are also aware of the fact that we’re most creative when we’re together in the same place. Sometimes we also have little cultural differences of opinion which we always manage to work out, perhaps because we both find it fascinating to see a different perspective. These are all just little issues that add spice to our business, I’d say.
I once wrote an article called Another Barrier Down in which I talked about the fact that we are the first people in the history of the world for whom geography is not an obstacle for starting a business. In the article I said the business of the future will look quite different: our customers and clients will be people who share a consciousness, not a postal code.
It’s that new paradigm that Nick and I have heartily embraced in creating the Dreambuilders Community. We’re getting members from all over the globe who share our consciousness. It won’t be long before we’re holding events in a number of different countries and seeing that the entrepreneurial spirit can flourish almost anywhere. It’s wildly exciting to be part of this growing global community of inspired entrepreneurs.
Let me thank you, Barbara, for sharing your experiences and some insight into your creative entrepreneurial mind. So far I have learned a lot and I am definitely planning to sign up for your next “Establish Yourself as an Expert” teleclass!
