The Invisible Mentor

Archive for October, 2010

More Than Words is published by Harlequin, and before you fall off your seat, stay with me for a few minutes. Harlequin More Than Words is a program, where people can nominate women in their communities whose actions make a major difference in the lives of others. What Harlequin has done, which is what they are known for, is to produce novellas inspired by the stories of award recipients.  These novellas are written by their best authors, some of whom are New York Times Bestselling Authors.

In More Than Words Volume 6 are five short stories: Almost Lost by Joan Johnston, inspired by Katherine Chon, Sheltering Hearts by Robyn Carr, inspired   by Rhonda Clemons, Safely Home by Christina Skye, inspired by Barbara Huston, No Limits by Rochelle Alers, inspired by Lara Tavares, and The Princess Shoes by Maureen Child, inspired by Roni Lomeli. The sheroes who  inspired the stories, started non-profit organizations to fill a need within their community.

• Katherine Chon started the Polaris Project to combat human trafficking
• Rhonda Clemons founded Zoë  Institute to provide resources to assist single mothers

• Barbara Huston founder Partners in Care Maryland, which is a “service in exchange” program for the elderly
• Lara Tavares founded Sky’s the Limit Youth Organization to provide computers to students in need
• Roni Lomeli founded Shoes That Fit to provide shoes to children in need.

These five women are our invisible mentors because they saw a need in their communities and filled it. For two years in a row, I have known one of  the award recipients. Several years ago, Lava Tavares did graphic design work for me so I was delighted that she had won one of the More Than Words Awards. I lost touch with Lara, and had no idea that she had started Sky’s the Limit. I have always admired Lara Tavares’ compassion. Over 10 years ago, a friend of hers was terminally ill with sickle cell anemia and died before they could find a match for her. Lara was involved in a fundraiser to secure funds to help raise her friend’s son.

I have read three of the six More Than Words, and it finally occurred to me that there is someone I know in South Africa who is worthy of such an award and I plan to nominate her in January 2011 when the awards are open for 2012. Which woman do you know who is doing wonderful things in her community? Why don’t you consider nominating her for Harlequin More Than Words Award. This isn’t a book review, but I recommend reading More Than Words Volume 6 because it educates us on what others are doing, and it may inspire some to take a leap of faith and embark on projects that are dear to their hearts.

What are some worthy projects in your community that you’d like to tell us about? How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Over the past three days, I have been participating in The International Alliance for Women’s 30th Anniversary Celebration at their Global Partnership Forum held in Toronto, October 24 – 26, 2010. It was a delight to meet women from all over the world and have a dialog with them. Whenever you meet someone who may appear different from you, once you start talking you will find some common ground.

Next week we will go back to the usual schedule for the Invisible Mentor. I have some really good content for you. Today, I have 10 quotations for you to reflect on.

1. “Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.” W. Clement Stone, Author and Businessman
2. “It is pointless to think of the lost hours of yesterdays. The way to make learning a lesson a celebration instead of a cause for regret is to only ask,’ “How can I put this to use tomorrow?’”  Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards
3. “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe
4. “Imitate until you emulate; match and surpass those who launched you.  It’s the highest form of thankfulness.” — Mark Victor Hansen
5. Treat colleagues with respect. Give them credit for what they have accomplished. Deal with conflicts in a gentle, empathic way…hey, just be kind. Stefan Einhorn, Educator
6. “You only lose energy when life becomes dull in your mind. Your mind gets bored and therefore tired of doing nothing. Get interested in something! Get absolutely enthralled in something! Get out of yourself! Be somebody! Do something! The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.” Norman Vincent Peale, Pastor, Speaker and Author
7. “Let there be nothing within thee that is not very beautiful and very gentle, and there will be nothing without thee that is not beautiful and softened by the spell of thy presence.” James Allen,  Author of As A Man Thinketh
8. “Have a strategy on how you do things [and] execute the strategy with passion.” Purdy Crawford
9. “When you’re starting off, it takes ten times more energy than you thought.” Maria Nemeth, Author of The Energy of Money
10. “You cannot carry the requirements of a prior position into a new one without first assessing the new situation and its needs. You can bring some things with you if they fit the new framework; the rest you must toss aside.” John Gardner

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

All book links are affiliate links.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

As part of the cycle of life, old things often become new again. Look at the fashion industry for instance, styles are constantly in and out of vogue. Think about a project that did not get approved a few years ago, is it now a better time to try again? Think about a product you wanted to create but couldn’t because the technology didn’t exist, is now the right time to make that product? Think about a product that is in the mature or decline stage of the Product Life Cycle, is there a way you can breathe new life into it?

Brazen Careerist created a new service in beta called Network Roulette, which is essentially speed networking on steroids. Whenever they have the Network Roulette Event, you go to their website, and at the start of the event, you click on the wheel and the show starts. A box pops up where  you type in what you are looking for and what you are providing. You can also skip this step.

The Network Roulette Wheel spins and it randomly chooses someone for you to network with for three minutes. I recently played Network Roulette and at first I was very stressed. It’s like instant messaging where both parties type what they have to say to each other, but in this case you have three minutes to make your point. After a while, I became more relaxed. And when I think about it, if I was stressed out, that meant that others were probably feeling the same way I was.

During the duration of the event (60 minutes), I met some interesting people. In between your 3-minute networking sessions, you get the opportunity to have a virtual drink at the virtual bar? You cannot build a relationship in three minutes, but you can start a conversation. I appreciate the Network Roulette service, it’s another point to meet people who you normally wouldn’t meet.

A roulette is an old idea that has been resurrected with a new twist. What old ideas can you make new again to provide a cutting edge service? Read magazines that you usually wouldn’t read. Put yourself into different situations to have a different experiences.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Photo Credit: Flickr (Conor Ogle) via Apture

Laurel Touby – Your Invisible Mentor

In Part Two of Laurel Touby’s interview, there are additional nuggets for you. Here is a success story that showing that persistence pays. Many people hear about people who have attained spectacular success, but often do not hear about the hard work that went on behind the scenes. Laurel worked very hard for what she accomplished. She had a need, and created a solution to fill her need, and discovered along the way that others had that same need. Filling that need of building a community turned into a successful venture for her. If there was one thing to take away from this interview, it’s to never take no as the final answer. Never give up on your dream because someone said NO to you.

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Laurel Touby: I started out as a journalist and made a living as a journalist. Somehow I found myself forming a community of professionals because of my own need. If you start any company, you quickly learn that your own need is often reflective of the needs of others. So once I discovered that I had this need to commune with other people who were like me – fellow journalists, media professionals. Other people came out of the woodworks and told me that they wanted to attend more parties. In the beginning, I didn’t realize it was a business, I just knew that I was filling a need. The need was community, and back then we didn’t have Facebook, we had bars and restaurants, we had local watering holes.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Laurel Touby: What big break? I never got a big break, okay? I’m a woman, I could be a black lesbian and I would have more going against me than being just a woman. But the people discriminated against the most in society are women, lesbian and ethnic groups, so I am one out of the three. As a woman, I didn’t get many breaks. I grew up middle class so that was a break, I’m white so that’s a break, and I did go to a good school, but honestly, that didn’t help me at all. In terms of reaching out, I couldn’t find anybody in my networks who had money to lend me, so I hooked up with the “White Boys Network”, you know the “Old Boys Network.” And the way I did that is I aggressively tried to align myself with anybody who I thought would have money. I met this guy in a café and I hounded him to meet with me, because I thought maybe he knew people with money. He looked like he had money. And that’s how you do it. You have to be aggressive, put yourself out there and face rejection, because you will be rejected 99.99 percent of the time.

You have to look past the rejection, and move on to the next person. It’s a numbers game and that was a huge lesson I learned early on not to take rejection so personally. Most people get rejected and they give up. You have to be the one in a thousand, or even a million who doesn’t give up, keep going. The hard part is realizing that it’s not personal and you have to move on to the next person, and the next person and the next person until you hear yes. Believe me it hurts getting rejected. I got a lot of pain but I got stronger and stronger and less soft.

In the beginning, you are really soft and tender, you are young, new, fresh, or whatever, so every rejection is painful. It hurts so badly that you cry, and you hate yourself and feel like you are no good. The next one comes and you say, “Oh I have had this before and I survived it.” It’s sort of like dating, you go out and you are so excited, and you think this is the one, and every time you think this is the one, and the first hundred of them you feel pain when you get rejected when it doesn’t last.

Or even if you date for two months and it doesn’t last, you go, “Oh my God, I’m never going to find anybody,” and then you get through it and you realize that you are not going to die. And you realize that, PAIN DOES NOT KILL. That’s when you get stronger, when you realize that pain does not kill. And when you realize that pain does not kill, you can go through more of it, and more of it and more of it. After that you start to get the payoffs of your incredible strength and fortitude of going forward because you are moving, you are moving forward now, you are not being stopped by the pain. You are not moving backwards because of the pain, you are moving forward, you are moving through it to the next thing, and you are actually getting traction, and you are going somewhere. That’s life affirming, and that’s when you start to rise above it and make progress, and eventually you will get somewhere if you keep pushing forward.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Laurel Touby: I don’t know if there was a big failure, but there were many little ones along the way. I failed to be a good manager. I was a terrible manager, and I probably lost tons of money because of it. You lose good people when you aren’t a good manager. Did I learn from it? I learned that I shouldn’t manage. I mean I’m not good at certain things, and once you learn that, you delegate those things to other people who do them better. So I got into a position where I could delegate those things. In the beginning, I would just manage horribly, and would tell people that I wasn’t a good manager, and would say, “Sorry I hurt your feelings, what can I do better?” and people just don’t take that. If there’s a good economy, they will quit, and you have to hire another person and teach them what to do and start out all over again. Learning that you are bad at something is a good thing to know, and I failed at managing. The lesson I learned is, maybe I cannot get better at this, but I can hire someone to be between me and the people. If you cannot afford to do that then you are going to keep paying a price because you are going to lose people constantly and have to rehire. That’s a price you have to pay.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Laurel Touby: I am really proud that mediabistro was my own company and that I didn’t take on partners. In the beginning I wanted to take on partners and it would have been a huge mistake, which I discovered years later. But at the time, I felt it was a horrible deficit that I didn’t have a partner. I wanted help, and wanted someone around to bounce ideas off. Most partnerships fail because you end up in huge fights about every question, and every single decision to be made. The better move is to hire all the extra expertise that you need. Hire friends, and create your informal advisory board. It’s a little more work than having a partner. I’m proud that I’m a woman who owned a company and survived without a partner, and I owned most of the company when I sold it. A lot of people raise capital and give away all of their company. Everybody would tell me to take what I could get, not to worry about how much of the company I owned, and that it didn’t matter how much I owned because the company was going to be big when I sold it. Those people, they owned tiny pieces of their company, so when they sold, they didn’t keep as much money. I’m really proud that I was able to hold my ground there.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Laurel Touby: I had mentors before I started mediabistro. I would also say that my investors were my mentors because they were pretty impressive. They had accomplished so much and I looked up to them. I honestly thought the company was going to be worth, if I was lucky, $7 million when I was first starting out, but from day one when I got my investment, the investors said, “So what’s your number? Everybody has a number?” and I said, “I don’t know, $7 million?” and he yelled at me, “No it’s not, your number has to be $33 million. If you don’t make $33 million on the sale, we don’t get our money back, and this investment wouldn’t be worth it.”  I thought, “Holy cow! I really pulled the wool over his eyes.” There is no way I would sell for that much. Fast forward 10 years later, we sold for what we sold. He was right and I was wrong, that’s the funny part. He had vision that I didn’t have at the time, I didn’t see my value. Eventually, I created that value.

Avil Beckford: As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Laurel Touby: I would say to do what I did, which is to believe in yourself blindly. If your readers are women, women don’t believe they can do it until they have done it, but men do, so you have to learn that skill. Be cocky, bluff, you have to put on a face because that’s what the guys are doing. They are faking it till they are making it. That expression came from them.

Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

Laurel Touby: It’s always mixed. I love all my people, my customers, and the business people who I deal with. I love them and it’s very important to be in an industry where you love the people because you have to spend time with them off hours. I spend an incredible amount of time at dinners, breakfast, and lunch. On vacation I’m meeting people in my industry and I’m happy to meet them. I consider it a total mix of personal and professional.

Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

Laurel Touby: 

1. Do not take rejection personally
2. Pain does not kill
3. Women don’t believe they can do it until they have done it
4. You have to picture something in your mind and the steps to get there. You do not have to know all the steps, but you have to take the first one
5. You learn by doing

Avil Beckford: When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

Laurel Touby: Believe it or not, I don’t have a lot of down time.  I have every minute of every day scheduled. But during down time I like reading and catching up with the paper. I still read old media. I love old media.

Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Laurel Touby: Great ideas are always around you so you have to execute them. The hardest is not the generation of the ideas, but the execution. One of the things that I am good at is visioning. You have to be able to picture something in your mind and the steps to get there. If you can’t picture the steps to get there, you can’t get there, so sometimes that means that you have to start stepping in that direction, and the steps appear to you so you know what the second step is and so on.

When I started the website, the first thing was to put up the website, but I didn’t know what the next step was. I didn’t know how to get traffic to the website so that became apparent to me as I lived my life. I started talking up the website, sending email to people telling them about the website. I did very guerilla things to promote the website, and I learned by doing and I learned what worked and what didn’t. Inviting people to the cocktail party promoted the website. Going to the party and giving out little postcards with the website name on it worked to promote the website. It’s funny how offline stuff work for online stuff.

Avil Beckford: How do you define success?

Laurel Touby: Success is very subjective. It’s whatever makes you feel good about yourself. So if that’s learning how to bake a cake, you are a success, and you should make the best cake that you can make. Don’t look for external validation to tell you whether or not you are a success. Success can only come inside. I feel like I am successful at some things and not so at others. I am subjective so I am evaluating different things. I don’t think it’s money at all, I think it’s happiness. If you can live your day being happy, you are a success.

Avil Beckford: Which book had a profound impact on your life?

Laurel Touby: It’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan tells you through science, the 12 things that make human beings happy, and you read it and go, “Oh my God, I have 11 of those 12 things, I’m happy and I had no idea.” It makes you realize that money does not make you happy. If you make a certain amount of money, beyond that, you are not any happier. If you can make $60,000 in America, you are at the happiness level. And people can achieve $60,000 no problem, it isn’t an impossible dream. If you think a million dollars is going to make you happy, it’s a total lie, it won’t make you happy.

Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?

Everything excites me about life. I live my life with passion and I just feel really great. I love getting up in the mornings. If I were sick, that would be another story. I’m lucky because I am healthy and not everybody has that. If you have health, you don’t need anything else.

Avil Beckford: How do you nurture your soul?

Laurel Touby: Meeting and talking to people. I am very public, but also very private. When you turn me on, I am high energy and I perform. I love the performance of being around, and connecting to people, but when I am in solitude, I want to be solitary, and I don’t want to be around people. I don’t know which one nurtures my soul more. I have a double personality, I’m an introverted extrovert. When I’m introverted I want to write poetry, and when I am extroverted I want to be around people making them laugh, you know, joking around and helping them.

Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for? Or, if I gave you a magic wand, what would you use it for?

Laurel Touby: To be a man! On the front page of the New York Times there was an article where they turned girls into boys in Afghanistan. Parents turned little girls into boys because they didn’t have a boy in the family. One little girl was asked if she minded because they cut her hair and dressed her like a boy, and the little girl said no because she didn’t get yelled at on the street when she is a boy. She didn’t get pinched or attacked when she is a boy. When she is a boy people treat her with respect. When you read that article, you go WOW! Women are diminished in our society and they always have been. I don’t know why.

Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..

Laurel Touby: I’m happy when I’m doing something well, whatever that something is.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Book links are affiliate links.

Related articles

• Introducing ‘Women to Watch’ (blogs.forbes.com)
• How I Did It: Laurel Touby, Founder of Mediabistro

Laurel Touby – Your Invisible Mentor

This interview is very different from the other interviews that I have conducted. Some of the questions are similar, but today we get the opportunity to get into the head of someone who built one of the first online community. As the case with many successful businesses, Laurel Touby built a business out of her own need. She wanted a community of her peers to network with and mediabistro was born. For a few years I have admired what Laurel created from afar. I asked her if I could interview her and she said yes. One of the lessons that came out very loud in the interview, is that persistence pays. Don’t take no for an answer, the more comfortable you become with hearing NO, the easier it becomes to work through what you perceive as rejection. As you read Part One of Laurel’s interview, think about what you have in common with her. What lessons can you learn from her?

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Laurel Touby: I started out as a journalist and made a living as a journalist. Somehow I found myself forming a community of professionals because of my own need. If you start any company, you quickly learn that your own need is often reflective of the needs of others. So once I discovered that I had this need to commune with other people who were like me – fellow journalists, media professionals. Other people came out of the woodworks and told me that they wanted to attend more parties. In the beginning, I didn’t realize it was a business, I just knew that I was filling a need. The need was community, and back then we didn’t have Facebook, we had bars and restaurants, we had local watering holes.

Walk me through the evolution of mediabistro.

Laurel Touby: I started out at a bar with some friends, and we just called it a cocktail party, which happened once a month. People would bring their friends, and eventually, the party grew to be bigger and bigger so we started collecting business cards and entered the information into a database. The big transformation happened when email came along, because once there was email, it made life a whole lot easier. We were able to leverage the technology to invite hundreds of people quickly and easily.

Today, Meetup.com is creating a whole business around the ease of organizing people within a vertical, an interest group, an enthusiast of one kind or another, and they are not the only one. Eventbrite, Evite, and all of the invitation software platforms are making it easy for people to self organize. Back then, I was doing it all by hand, so I would send out postcards and make phone calls and fax people and invite them to a cocktail party. Once they came, the magic happened, that’s when I figured out that these people really didn’t want to stand there by themselves drinking a cocktail. They wanted to be introduced, and it was a simple gesture of kindness to force people to meet. I would grab somebody by the hand and pull them over to another person and I would say, “You guys have something in common, why don’t you figure out what it is and meet each other.” People loved that, so I became like a Party Event Dominatrix.

I started wearing a feather boa so people could find me in a crowd, and they would say to other attendees, “You have to meet Laurel, she will introduce you to everybody.” Even though I couldn’t remember anybody’s name, I would force people to meet, and so that’s what I did. It could have just been that, a good, old-fashioned party, but in the mid 1990s, I figured out that there was this thing called the Web. So after email, someone suggested that I should have a website where people could meet 24/7, where I wouldn’t have to introduce them once a month, but all year round on this website. I thought how nifty. The person who suggested I get a website, her boyfriend was a programmer. He had a similar site so we copied the programming from his site, and that was the beginnings of this media community online, mediabistro.com.

Now that you have an online presence, what did you do next?

Laurel Touby: In the beginning, everything was free, and it was a way for people to organize and meet each other. We had a bulletin board online, event listings, both of which we still have today. We also had job listings online, and we didn’t have much else. There was no content, it was very static. A couple of years later, I realized that – the job listings were doing really well, the bulletin board was doing well – this could be a business.

I noticed that Monster and Hot Jobs were making money off their job listings so I thought maybe I should start charging for this service. The first time I tried, no one wanted to pay, and they told me to keep it free. Eventually people agreed that it was worth their money so they paid $100 for each job listing, but only if they were happy. I didn’t want to charge any unhappy customers.

I had a real business and started making money every month, and that’s when I wrote a business plan and went out and tried to find investors. That’s always fun when you have no business background. I was still considered a journalist. I found someone who would take a chance on me in early 2000. That person suggested another person so there were two people invested in me. By March 2000, I had raised the money, and boom you know what happened in March 2000, the internet crashed, the stock market crashed, everything went downhill so I had to survive that.

I had some money in the bank, but it wasn’t going to last forever because we had no real revenue. We survived that and added classes, seminars, and membership very soon after. We had to figure out a business model that didn’t rely only on job listings. It included it, but it wasn’t just job listings, and that saved us in 2000, and again when 9/11 hit in 2001. Luckily we had the other revenue streams and we just slowly pulled out of it.

After you started paid membership, did you lose many subscribers?

Laurel Touby: No, because not everyone had to pay. You only paid if you wanted to use certain features of the website. If you wanted to get premium content on the website like How to Pitch, you had to take out an AvantGuild membership. If you use one of those articles you can possibly get work. A lot of people get work because of those articles – they are really helpful.

What’s a typical day like for you?

Laurel Touby: Now I work at mediabistro two days a week and I also work on my own. I sold the company in 2007 for $23 million. I decided I wanted to work on mediabistro part-time, and work on other projects for myself. I am the ambassador for mediabistro. I talk to the press, speak at events and attend conferences. I am still the face of the company. And on the other few days of the week, I give advice to start-ups, sit on advisory boards, and I have a lot of meetings. I’m always in meetings. Those are my days, they are mixed up, there are so many different things that I’m working on at one time. Every day is different. It’s hard to have a typical day.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Laurel Touby: I have never had a problem with motivation. I think I was born trying to prove myself. It’s like that in New York. There are a lot of people in New York City struggling to be better than the next person. There is so much competition, and you feel it in the energy in the air. You can’t sit still because if you are sitting still, people are asking you, “What are you doing, what are you doing? What are you up to? What are you working on?” It’s impossible to live here and not do something. In terms of what motivates me, probably watching everyone around me doing better and working harder, that’s what motivates me. I think I should be working harder and doing better. It’s hard for me not to be motivated.

If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Laurel Touby: That’s a tricky question because everything is so much easier now. If I had to look back to then, it’s funny because I’m not one of those people who look back and say a ton of things they would have done differently. I could have been more “Craigslisty” and gone broader and not be just for media people. I ended up specializing in a niche, whereas Craig’s List went broad – he is doing it for everybody. We started at exactly the same time, so when I look back, I might have gone a different route, I might have gone broader and worth a billion dollars instead of where we are, but I like the audience that I’m serving. In that sense it was a very conscious decision. So I don’t know if I would have done things differently.

What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Laurel Touby: That’s hard because I learn things every day. I wake up and it’s a discovery, and I meet people who are doing really interesting things. I learned two things today, they are not big things, they are small things about certain industries, so I wouldn’t say that there is anything huge that I’ve learned that I could put into practice right now.  There are just tons of small things.

What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Laurel Touby: The iPad and mobile stuff are going to be huge, and these are the things that are going to change the landscape for everybody else. These are areas to watch. Everyone is talking about how everything is going to be video, but I personally don’t think that everything should be video, and I don’t want to sit there and watch everything on video. I don’t want to read the New York Times on video. I want to read text and occasionally look at video.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Laurel Touby: I’m not in charge of the business anymore, but I feel that we’ve established ourselves. We have been doing this for over 10 years. We started as a cocktail party in 1994, and in 1996 on the web, so it would be really hard for anyone to catch up where we are at in terms of visibility. Everyone in the media is aware of us, we have a good track record and reputation, and we are constantly innovating so it would be very difficult for me to say that there is a big threat coming up.

You are not going to get any entrepreneur telling you that there is a threat first of all. Nobody will ever admit it if there is. No entrepreneur believes ever that there is a threat because we are all so positive. Entrepreneurs by nature don’t feel like there is a threat ever, they always feel like they can accomplish anything. They believe that they can overcome anything so this question is really tough. I personally do not believe that there is ever a threat.

Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

Laurel Touby: The biggest challenge was getting through the internet crash and 9/11. Getting through 9/11 was a huge challenge living in New York. New York was coming apart at the seams, everybody was upset and worried, and hosting a community website felt really silly. You didn’t feel like you were doing anything really important, so it was a challenge to get past that reaction and feel like you were doing something that helped, that mattered. I didn’t get over the challenge myself. I looked around for role models and I saw them, I heard people in the government telling us to get back on your feet, go shopping or what have you. They told us not to stop doing business, but to keep moving.

My investors were very aggressive about moving forward and not stopping, so I looked around at these role models and said, “You know what, I cannot let my staff be “mopey” and depressed, I have to lead.” I took the advice of those role models and tried to lead, put up a good front and said, “Let’s fake it till we make it.” You pretend that everything is okay and that everything is going to be fine and plough forward. We scheduled cocktail parties and events that played off the worry and depression. We scheduled an event called, “How to Laugh When You Want to Cry,” and it was humor in a time of tragedy. It was an event talking about what everyone was feeling and talking about, and it was hugely successful. People came to the event because they wanted to talk about what they were feeling. We basically capitalized on our own upset, our own depression and turned it into an event that other people could feel good about coming to. You can’t ignore this hugely upsetting thing, but you can’t stop business either. And our business was having a lot of events and online stuff at that time. As they say, the show must go on.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

Laurel Touby: I learned that you can’t just be in your own head worrying. You have to reach out to people and listen to what they have to say. A lot of times when you are in your head, you are alone. You are running a company and don’t have anyone to turn to so you have to create a mini advisory board of people who are outside of your company that have nothing to gain or lose from your success or failure. You go to those people to seek their advice, their counsel and wisdom. Get a cup of coffee with them, and turn them into your informal advisory board.

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