We’ve been starting small businesses since we were first married over 26 years ago…this is a list of all the things that were successful and not so successful.

We started selling a book I had written as a thesis project called “Mother Natures Remedies: The First Season” it went into niche magazines like “Mother Earth News” and “Organic Gardener”… didn’t sell one and that was expensive advertising of dollars without any return.

The Savings and Loan scandal had reached Houston, where we were living at the time, and we started a landscaping business…first with the idea of ​​doing “Landscaping.” We had a partner with a degree in Botany and experience, but since people were going into foreclosure and commercial property was a dud, we decided to do Lawn Maintenance instead. We put together flyers and take them to all the real estate agents. Because there were so many FHA and VA foreclosures and they were built in subdivisions with homeowners associations…the FHA and VA had to “maintain” the yards or the homeowners associations would levy liens on the housing for violation of homeowners laws. Association Agreements. Our small business obtained contracts to maintain foreclosed yards for 80 houses per day at 25.00 per yard. We started doing the work ourselves, but it became too much, so we had to hire “Subcontractors” to do the patios that we couldn’t. Why “Subcontractors”? Because we didn’t want to pay workers compensation. They used their own trucks, but our team…sometimes they used our trucks…they charged us by the yard and we charged the real estate agents who listed the houses. It was a lucrative undertaking and a lucrative business.

At the same time, I started working for an interior designer in Houston who had a very good reputation. I would teach his course at his office or at my office or at Rice University. We’d teach the average housewife how to showcase her home without hiring an interior designer. We also taught interior design students who were failing their courses how to pass and succeed in their field. The woman who designed the Course, Athalee Curry, was simply the most brilliant woman and taught principles that were more common sense than anything else. Because of her focus, that venture was successful. Together we made designs for model houses and also for other clients. This too was a lucrative and successful business and I was able to learn some business principles from Athalee that have paid off.

When we moved from Houston to Idaho, I applied those same principles to put my companies in a different state, but the mindset just wasn’t there. Hiring a “lawn maintenance” company or an “interior designer” was not something that was done here. These were “Do It Yourself” and “Home Made” types of people who didn’t have the extra income to “hire” them to do it, nor did they have the inclination to be “taught” it, so those businesses don’t work here .

By 1984, I was singing all over the South, I had a video on VH1, my songs were on the radio, and I was making a lot of television appearances. When I moved here to Idaho, there were some people from the south who recognized me and asked if I would teach them or their children how to sing and get into the industry. It was a new business, one that I have been running since 1991 and in which I have been successful. I started in my living room and with little equipment. As my clientele started to grow, I would go back to investing in better equipment. Eventually, I was able to get equipment for a recording studio. Word of mouth and my reputation grew my business, the shows and success of my students kept my reputation strong and my business successful. Now, I only teach voice when I want. I have taught others the same techniques that I developed in voice teaching and was even successful enough that I was able to work with Warren Barighan at Vocal Bio-matrix and do therapy sessions of my own.

When I was in elementary school, I started making skincare and makeup products. I would sell them to my friends from kindergarten and my parents thought it was cute. I was four years old when I read my first encyclopedia set, so I did research and study. My grandmother was a healer in Samoa…she taught me the ancient ways and as she grew older I combined my traditional western education with her ethnobotanical treatment methods. I worked for a medical company that was a subsidiary of Baylor College of Medicine and started working on nutritional oncology approaches. I developed a nutritional foundation that would prolong the life of a cancer patient by 18 months if she were using certain chemotherapy agents. The studies and trials submitted by the FDA are extremely expensive and biased, so I decided I didn’t want to release this formula with FDA restrictions.

At about that time, Congress passed a Supplemental Bill that would fit our company perfectly. We formed a corporation, put together a board of directors along with doctors and pharmacists and proceeded in this company…which turned out to be a total disaster. We followed all the SBA guidelines, went to the Center for Economic Development and got help…and doctors, pharmacists and vets were using our products and testing them and we had a 98% success rate on everything we put out there. ..and still failed. My husband was diagnosed with Insulin Resistance and could not stand the restrictive diet. As a research scientist, I knew that sugar alcohols are still absorbed, I knew that aspartame was a glutamate and that it would spike your insulin causing further complications with your blood sugar… Splenda was no good as chlorine would spike his blood pressure and cause some other problems… so he asked me to think of an alternative. I started another company in Functional Foods. I wanted the product I came up with to not only be a sweetener, but also add health benefits to the body. Sweeteners are a funny thing…the body can’t tell one sugar from another and synthetics, well the body just doesn’t know what to do with them! Sugar transport systems however know the difference, which is why there is a transport system for glucose and another for fructose. I invented a sugar that can lower blood sugar and inhibit carbohydrate absorption.

We started our company and in a few months we were manufacturing, in a week after manufacturing a small amount, we had our first sale, in a few more weeks we had our first national sales, in a couple of months we were selling 100,000.00/month to a very large national company. already known as one of the main health care centers for the elderly in the country. Since August 2003, this company has been selling “SugarBlend” nationwide to our customers.

It has been a hard road and success did not come overnight. There were a lot of business partners down the road who wanted to steal it all, there were investors down the road who wanted to steal it all…we’ve been in court a couple of times because of this…a potential investor stole an 18,000.00 check off a desk and he cashed in… that almost sunk us. We had people who wanted to give us license agreements, our friends, who told us… we will never hurt you! and then he would take all the money, never pay the fees and walk away with almost everything while we paid the price losing 780,000.00 in a year…lost by friends who “would never hurt us” and forced us into personal bankruptcy. Our company is still going strong and our product sales are still going up, growth is slow and methodical, which is conservative growth, but it is growth.

So what advice would you give to those who want to start a small business and succeed? First I would say, run… don’t walk away… this is not for the faint of heart! Check in your area if it’s a service and see if there really is a need and mindset for what you want to offer. Take a look at the competition and do your homework to make sure this company is viable. Then order your ducks, decide how you want your business to function, move and grow. Make plans and goals, if you don’t reach those goals, then it’s time to go back and redesign your plan of attack and your methods. Be on the lookout for business partners… do you need one?… can you do it yourself… do you have a strong will? Can you take criticism and can they? Can you hire the experience? Might be easier if you can do that. Re-invest… Budget your earnings so you don’t need a bank or an investor… Banks are a horrible place to take out a loan or anything! If you don’t do it right, they’ll take your fillings out of your teeth to get their money back!… They’ll bankrupt you faster than an investor. Investors…if you plan well you won’t need their money, if you don’t plan well they will end up owning all your hard work and whatever else they can too…just like the banks. The saying…”Those who have the gold make the rules” is true, so you just don’t need their gold. The last piece of advice I would give is this… If you are self-employed… this will be your life, your whole life, so make sure the sacrifices are worth it, some just aren’t.