WOMEN/STARTUP/ENTREPRENEUR SPECIAL..2 Women Entrepreneurs..

2 Women Entrepreneurs Who’ve Been There Tell All 

 
 Susan Leger Ferraro, founder of an early-childhood schools chain, and Laura Fitton, a digital business owner, irreverently detail what has helped them most as entrepreneurs

Keep your equity in your pocket. And help out your mentor. These are two among a handful of advices proffered by Susan Leger Ferraro, repeat entrepreneur and founder of Little Sprouts, a chain of early-childhood schools that she sold in 2008 to American Education Group, and Laura Fitton, who founded Pistachio, a Twitter consultancy, and OneForty, an app store for Twitter that HubSpot acquired last year.
GET MENTORS
    Ferraro has had six mentors (“all men — but very evolved  men”) including Deepak
Chopra, whom she met in 2002. “If you want to talk to someone, you make sure to talk to them,” said Ferraro. Fitton, whose mentors include Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin, said successful businesspeople like mentoring energetic entrepreneurs because it expands their spheres of influence. When you do find mentors “don’t ask lazy questions — ask specific questions”, she advised. Both women emphasised that mentoring should be a two-sided relationship. Ask your mentor what you can do for him or her — not just the other way around.
VOLUNTEER
    Ferraro gained experience and relationships critical to starting her own firm by working a
few hours a week — gratis — at other companies. “Those experiences taught me what I didn’t know as a business leader,” said Ferraro. Fitton warned against using busyness as an excuse for not volunteering. “You have the same 24 hours a day that Mother Teresa had. That Gandhi had. You decide what you’re going to do with it,” she said.
ALWAYS SAY YES
    Leap or lose. If things don’t work, Ferraro points out, you can always pull back. Seven
 years ago, WGBH, the public television station in Boston, wanted to launch a pre-school literacy curriculum in the classroom. The organisation had approached 15 school chains across the country offering to train teachers and provide the necessary resources, but had been repeatedly rebuffed. The programme seemed like too much work. Its effectiveness wasn’t assured. “I said, ‘When do you want to start?’” Ferraro recalled. Today, WGBH is still one of Little Sprouts’ most important partners. “I can’t believe all those other people told them no,” Ferraro said.
APPROACH VCS
    Fitton advises against trying to “parachute in on the mostwidely-read, popular venture
capitalist blogger”. Instead, she said, start with your inner circle — those who trust and believe in you. “When an entrepreneur cold calls me and says, will you introduce me to some angels, I tell them it wouldn’t work because I can’t give a credible introduction of who you are and what you’re doing,” she said. “So start with the people closest to you, even if they are eight degrees from venture capitalists. They will get you one step closer.”
OR DON’T APPROACH VCS AT ALL
    Eight weeks after emerging from the Tech Stars accelerator, Fitton’s company,
OneForty, closed a $2 million venture round. It happened fast — too fast, said Fitton. The company wasn’t ready for it. “Our burn rate went way up and we became much more expensive,” she said. That happened before OneForty had quite settled on a direction. Taking venture capital means “hiring a boss you can’t fire”, she added. Ferraro’s venture investors insisted she relinquish several projects that mattered to her, including work in the community, and with the homeless. “I had to do it under the radar and behind their backs,” Ferraro said. She advised attendees to consider debt first and “keep your equity in your pocket”.
DON’T CRAFT CULTURE
    Fitton said having a mission and core values is very important. But they are “bullshit unless you make your hiring and firing decisions based on those things.” She adds that if you claim something is a core value but wouldn’t fire someone for not embodying it, then it is not really a core value. “Do you have the balls to tell your best engineer, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not a fit. You shouldn’t work here anymore because you’re disrupting the company’s culture.’ Even though they wrote 80% of the code?”
FIND BALANCE
    A single mother, Ferraro insisted on “sacred time” with her three sons while building her companies. “There were hours where I wouldn’t answer the phone except in an emergency,” she said. “Whoever was my second-in-command I would say, ‘I’m taking two hours. We’re going to the zoo.’” Fitton’s experience was different. Forced to relocate to California for three months during the launch of OneForty, “I threw my kids under the bus,” she confessed. The children, aged two and three, stayed with their father, from whom Fitton was divorced, “and his awesome girlfriend who is now their stepmom”. Balance did come eventually. Since selling the company, Fitton, who is now HubSpot’s inbound marketing evangelist, has pulled back. Last spring, she worked four-day weeks to spend more time with her kindergartner.
BE NICE
    Simply being gracious can set you apart. Ferraro said that when she is asked to speak
at an event she sends the organisers something from Edible Arrangements to thank them for the opportunity. Fitton described how she met social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk, who was thronged by admirers at a party following a presentation. “All I could think of was, ‘Someone needs to get Gary some food,’” said Fitton, who brought him a plate. The two have been close ever since. “Kindness and consideration,” said Fitton, “are low-hanging fruit.”
    (Source: Leigh Buchanan / Inc.com)

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