The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘mediabistro.com’

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.

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Related articles

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

Many studies have shown the positive impact that mentoring has on both mentor and mentee. However, many people will never have the privilege of being involved in a traditional mentoring relationship. That doesn’t mean that you cannot reap some of the benefits of having a mentor.

What are the reasons for wanting a mentor? You have to know what you want before you can go after it. Identify two people who have done what you are trying to do (this may take doing some research to identify the appropriate people). What are three to five questions that you’d like to ask them?

For me, I’d like to make this blog content rich, since it’s an educational blog. Based on information in David Meerman Scott‘s book, Cashing In With Content, Laurel Touby has successfully done what I am trying to do with mediabistro.com the company she founded. If I got access  to Laurel, I’d ask her:

1. What are the critical steps you took to make mediabistro.com a success?
2. When you first started mediabistro.com, what are three things you did to secure subscribers?
3. Based on your experiences, what advice do have for someone who is trying to do what you did with mediabistro.com?

I have to spend time thinking about a second person because I do not think my choice, Steve Jobs would give me the time of day. While reading A Fine Line, a book I won in a Group Writing Project, the author Hartmut Esslinger, talks about Apple and their focus on consumer experience. I thought the strategy would work for this blog, for me to focus on reader experience. I then asked myself how would that work? How can I take an interview and turn it into a reader experience? How can I take a book review/summary and turn it into a reader experience. For the interview, I think interviewing the right person, will bring the interview to life and create a unique reader experience. Video and music would also enhance the effect.

For a book, that could be a bit tricky. What if the book was dry, but the content was definitely information that I think my readers should know about, what then? Whew, the heat is on, the onus is on me to figure it out. What are your thoughts? What are your two choices for mentors and what would you ask them?

At the off chance that Steve Jobs would give me the time of day, I would ask him, “What are the steps that I should take to create a unique reader experience. ” Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please comment. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

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