Success

Issue date:
Aug. 21-23, 1998

Lessons from America's new entrepreneurs

What the rest of us can learn from today's smart new success stories.

In this story:
Business experience is not a must
A truly unique product sometimes can sell itself
The ability to fall flat on your face ...
Magazines for entrepreneurs

Related story:
Six steps to success

Julia Stern (left) and Mailia Mills, Malia Mills swimwear. More than 12,000 swimsuits sold.

hat do you want to be when you grow up? This may seem like a strange question to ask in a story about how to turn yourself into an entrepreneur. Articles on the topic usually assume you're a risk-taker who wants to get rich quick, and offer tales of hucksterish millionaires advising how to sell like a pro.

This isn't that sort of story, though, for entrepreneurship isn't just about get-rich-quick schemes anymore. As the job market has changed over the past decade, most of us have begun to approach our careers with a new set of concerns. Once, you could count on job security in return for a job well done. Today, you could be fired at any time, so betting on a career with a big company has become as risky as starting your own. In that way, turning to entrepreneurship has become a career choice like any other -- one that puts your fate in your own hands.

What makes this new, more entrepreneurial generation different is that they don't have any long-held preconceptions about which career choice is the right one. All they know is what they've read most recently.

"We've seen the people in the newspapers who were laid off when they were 50," says Andy Spade, 36, who five years ago started a handbag company with his wife, Kate, 35. "We wanted to chase our own destiny." That made it easy to quit good jobs to do just that, and last year their company sold about $30 million worth of now-famous Kate Spade handbags.

The people who run the most successful start-ups are those who have passion for what they do. Tom First, 32, so loved the peach nectar he tasted on a trip to Spain that he convinced his friend Tom Scott, also 32, to help him bottle some and sell it in recycled wine bottles to yachtsmen in Massachusetts' Nantucket Harbor. Ten years later, they're selling $50 million worth of Nantucket Nectars all over America.

Business experience is not a must. Older and wiser types will tell you that you need a lot of experience to launch a successful business. It's true that does help. But don't be intimidated by those well-meaning people who would urge you to get more seasoning. Microsoft, Kinko's and Yahoo! are just a few of the companies started by people with no business experience at all. You could do worse.

In fact, you may have more skills at your disposal than you realize. Julia Stern, co-owner of Malia Mills, a swimwear designer in New York City, had never run a business before she helped launch the company. She did, however, have experience working on Sports Illustrated's famous swimsuit issue. The knowledge of the market she'd picked up there proved crucial.

A truly unique product sometimes can sell itself while you learn about business as you go. That's what happened to Magnetic Poetry founder Dave Kapell, 36, who was a struggling musician when he started the company. Now, it seems every refrigerator in America has word squares on it.

John Chuang, 33, did get an MBA, so he has more formal training than Kapell. But the co-founder of the staffing firm MacTemps didn't begin studying for the degree until years after the birth of the business. "Not only did I end up getting a lot out of the program, but the whole staff did, too," Chuang says, noting how he would come back to the office after class and tell his employees all about the tips he'd picked up that day.

Tom Scott of Nantucket Nectars believes the ability to achieve in the face of the overwhelming cluelessness most new entrepreneurs feel begins with a burning curiosity. "The thing that stuck with me from the first day was the rush, the fact that every day was something new. We figured out the glass bottles and the caps and the labels, and came up with a way to communicate with our customers. And the more we picked up steam, the more that rush increased, because we realized we really could figure out how to solve whatever problems came up."

That doesn't mean you'll always get it right the first time. "Failure is part of the process," says Jason Olim, 29, who started an online music retailer, CDNow, with his twin, Matthew. "Mistakes are the bricks with which you build businesses."

The ability to fall flat on your face and then peel yourself right off the pavement again takes a lot of self-confidence, something most young entrepreneurs have in spades. "There was never a point where I didn't think I could make it work," notes Todd Alexander, 30, owner of Vendemmia, an Atlanta wine distributorship. "Ignorance is bliss. As long as I had a place to store the wine and a truck to deliver it in, I believed that, eventually, I would sell it at a profit."

Marcia Kilgore, 29, started a wildly successful day spa in New York, Bliss, even though the town was littered with similar businesses. "I'm always hearing how I'm so positive, that I think anything can happen," she says. "Well, yeah, exactly. Why not? Be smart. Find your niche. Make it happen. I never think about why something hasn't been done already; I think about why nobody has done it right yet."

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Photo Credit: THEO WESTENBERGER FOR USA WEEKEND

Adapted from Upstart Start-Ups! ($15) by Ron Lieber, new in stores this week. Copyright © 1998 by Ron Lieber. Published by Broadway Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group.