The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [70]
Lynda went to a city college for a few months, but was so bored, she left to start working full-time. Like many people without a college degree, Lynda took a job in retail, at a dress shop. But here’s where the similarities end between the career trajectory of Lynda and that of most other people with only a high school diploma. “The shop owners complained constantly about the lack of business,” Lynda writes.7
Most people in such jobs tend to think, “That’s not my problem—they’re not paying me enough to worry about that. It’s their responsibility to generate the business, I just do what they say and collect my paycheck.” They toil ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years with such a mentality and wonder why they never raised their station in life.
Lynda, however, exercised some initiative and leadership. (See Success Skill #7 on the entrepreneurial mind-set). She writes:
“To help them out, I drew enchanting little female characters that embodied the mode of the times. Then I worked up headlines and text to accompany my illustrations. The owners placed these homespun ads in the local papers.
“It worked. Customers came in talking about the charming advertising.... The owners were only too happy to . . . keep me in the back room creating advertising instead of selling on the floor.... I was no longer a salesgirl; I was in the early stages of becoming a marketer.”8
Lynda had essentially worked herself—through the back door—into the position of marketing director. She left the dress shop and took another job, this time at the in-house advertising department of a larger company. She also started freelancing on the side. (See the section in Success Skill #1, Four Steps to Aligning Your Money and Your Meaning.) She told me, “I did a directmail campaign for a charming little store in the [San Fernando] Valley. It made them successful overnight, and it made me successful overnight. After that point, it was easier to find clients.
“I didn’t think of it as ‘starting a business.’ I just did advertising jobs. It started growing, and I had to hire more people to do them. I didn’t start out like they do today, with some grand business plan and a bunch of venture money. It just ... evolved.” Lynda left the larger company and started her own advertising agency at age nineteen, Lynda Limited, which was highly profitable from the start. This was only a few years after the advertising agencies she had applied to upon her high school graduation told her she’d need a college degree for any entry-level job with them. (See Success Skill #5 on bootstrapping your career and success—Lynda is a textbook example.) She later interviewed for a position as senior art director at her own firm, one of the very people who had turned her down years earlier!
Lynda (http://blog.lyndaresnick.com) has proven herself to be one of the great marketing minds in history. Ever drink one of those double-globed bottles of dark, tangy POM Wonderful Juice? That’s her brainchild. Hardly anyone had ever heard of pomegranates, let alone pomegranate juice, before Lynda came around. Now it’s available in practically every supermarket in America. She’s had a string of hits like that throughout her career.
In her book, Rubies in the Orchard: The POM Queen’s Secrets to Marketing Just About Anything, Lynda continues the theme we’ve been developing in this chapter. Good marketing is not about pushing your stuff onto an unwilling audience. It’s about listening to your audience. Really, really well. At its best, it is not a sleazy endeavor, but a deeply empathic one:Since my college career had been measured in months ... I never took a marketing course. Everything I know about marketing I learned on the job. My lack of [formal] education would have stalled a career in nuclear physics, but it never hindered my career in marketing. You can’t learn how to be a good marketer from a textbook....
The most important lesson of all is