I am sitting here watching one of my all-time favorite movies “A League of their Own.” In addition to being really funny, it has some great quotes to inspire entrepreneurs and other success-driven people.

• To achieve the incredible you have to attempt the impossible. Wow - SOOO true! How many times do we let the obstacles keep us from even starting something?
• There’s no crying in baseball. I love this one, too. It’s OK to have a pity party, but at times you need some tough love. My equivalent to some of the women entrepreneurs I work with is “put your big girl panties on and deal with it!” Same thing although coming from Tom Hanks it does sound a little better.
• It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, anyone could do it. It’s the hard that makes it great. Bingo. Building a business is hard. Achieving your dreams is hard. But that is what makes the accomplishment all the sweeter. Remember that next time you reach a gut-check or it gets too hard. How bad do you want it?

The added bonus of this movie for me is it was the last movie I watched with my dad a week before he died. The cancer had moved to his brain and he had trouble understanding subtle humor, but the outright funny scenes and one-liners in this movie made him laugh. To this day, it makes me laugh and cry - sometimes at the same time. What a great gift.

Great Labor Day reading: Fortune Magazine reported that the UN published a survey that found only 18% of American’s are clocking in over 48 hours per week. This suggests to me a couple of things:

• Being productive and getting more done in less time was not counted nor is valued
• No one surveyed entrepreneurs or small business owners
• Someone thinks running a family is a leisure activity

In addition to waving caution because we don’t appear to be working enough, the article also pointed out that we have, on average, 117 hours of ‘leisure’ time per week. Note that that includes sleep (because sleep is optional?). So if we take out the weekend (assuming we actually don’t work over the weekend), we’re left with 13.8 hours a day for sleep and non-work activities. Assuming you’re lucky enough to get the recommended 8 hours of sleep per night, you have 5.8 hours per day when you’re not working or not sleeping. I have to assume that running kids to soccer practice, preparing dinner, or commuting to work is also included in that paltry 5.8 hours. When did those tasks become leisurely? Any women entrepreneurs want to weigh in on that?

I believe the bottom line points to Americans taking a more integrated approach to work and life. We value productivity and believe we can be valuable at work and have a life (some call this work/life balance, though I before to see it as creating a sustainable life). We may not be punching the time clock as often as other countries, but it would also be interested to look at what type of work those other countries such as Peru and South Korea are doing.

ADDENDUM: From the same report, a different take on it. The Buffalo News reports the findings from the UN report as “Americans are more productive than any other country.” Unfortunately I can not locate the report on the web (nor did either article link to it!) so I can not draw my own conclusions, but such is the challenge with the press…it is all in the spin!

An article published in The New York Times Last week about Family-Leave Values reassured me that my choice to become an entrepreneur was the right one. It detailed some very depressing cases where people have been let go from their jobs because they were parents. What has this world come to when people are penalized for doing what comes, uh, naturally? Apparently even those who don’t have kids are not safe, either. People have been fired for taking off work to care for a sick spouse or an ailing parent. Some businesses are starting to get it, but it may just be up to us small businesses and entrepreneurs to show them how we bring in profits while caring for our employees.

When I started my first company 12 years ago, my goal was to prove that you could build a (highly) profitable company and honor people’s needs for work/life balance, including my own. We were successful and won several state and national awards for our creative attention to our employee’s needs. I have to admit, though, that it wasn’t always easy. There were several lessons we learned along the way that other companies, even the very small ones, can learn from:

1. Work/life considerations must come from the top. Building a company that respects the fact that there is more to life than work requires top-level commitment. It has to trickle down through all ranks of managers from the highest to the lowest.
2. Measurements must reflect the company’s commitment to results, not “face time.” Where possible, we had to make sure we valued results, not time in the office. This was especially important for remote workers.
3. Managers must be trained to manage flexible work schedules. Not everyone knows instinctively how to manage for results or measure productivity instead of accounting for hours. We found that we had to train our manager in how to manager people remotely and how to develop work plans and goals that reflected what we really wanted in our business – a contribution to our bottom line – rather than just showing up.
4. You must be able to say ‘no.’ In our business, not every position was conducive to a flexible work schedule. Some jobs really did have to be present in the office and we had to be prepared to make that call. It can not be flexibility at all costs.
5. Policies must be formalized and administrated fairly. Finally, because we sometimes said no, we had to have our policies documented and monitor the implementation for fairness. Any flexible work schedule request that came in had to be reviewed by the employee’s manager’s manager to make sure we were staying consistent and fair.

The benefits of looking after our employees can be monetized by low turnover rate. The cost to hire and train new people is high and it is more economical to keep good people, not to mention the negative impact high turnover can have on morale. By building certain philosophies into the very culture of our companies, we can set a new standard for running profitable businesses that recognize employees as people with lives outside of work.

Marci Alboher knows me. We’ve never met, but it is clear from her new book, One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work / Life Success (Warner Books) that she has my number.

Although not specifically a book about entrepreneurs, Marci’s book speaks directly to me as a ParentPreneur. She introduces a new term –slash – which makes me an author/consultant/speaker in slash-speak. Most entrepreneurs I know, especially women entrepreneurs, are slashes, too.

The slash idea, as Marci has so aptly observed, is about recognizing our own personal complexity and embracing the multiplicity of our passions. It is about designing our own life by not being afraid to follow our dreams, even when they take us down seemingly unrelated paths at the same time. How often does trying to raise a family and build a business seem like divergent paths? But yet we continue on and find ways to make it work.

In this engaging book Ms. Alboher, who herself is a slash as an author/journalist/speaker, shares stories of how other people – with a chapter dedicated to working parents - make their slash lives work and offers tips for aspiring business owners on the personal side of what is needed to survive as someone who carries multiple business cards. So if your answer to the question “What do you do?” depends on who is asking or you have various interests you hesitate pursuing because you don’t think they fit well together, you may be a slash, too. Marci’s book will entertain you with stories of others who are slashes and enlighten you with ways to successfully juggle your particular present/future/desired interests.

As many of you know, I am on vacation in Lucca, a small town in the Tuscany region of Italy. On our second night here we met a British couple who had sold their house in England and moved to Lucca after buying a Gelato shop here. Entrepreneurs are every where - I just can’t get away! And why would I want to? The common experiences led to a lengthy and enjoyable discussion. We talked for a long while about how hard owning a retail establishment was and how they feel like they are never able to get away. The way they look at it, they are able to take a couple of months off in the rainy Tuscan winter when the tourists decrease in numbers, so working long, hard hours the other times of the year seem worth it (a hard job that seems worth it…sound familiar to anyone else?)

A couple of days later I met a woman who, like me, has her first book coming out this summer. She is an American living in Lucca but is begrudgingly preparing to move back to the U.S. in October. After talking to her for a while, she shared with me that she and her husband owned several medical clinics and then sold out a couple of years ago. Since then they have been traveling while her husband tries his hand at first living the traveling-consultant life and now is making his first attempt at going back to work for someone else. I shared various cautionary tales I have heard about entrepreneurs cashing in their independence and working for someone else, but it seems they have found a company that values flexibility as much as they did. That would be the only way. After all, once you get used to not counting your vacation and sick days, it gets really hard to go back.

I guess what this whole experience confirms for me is that entrepreneurship is empowering but contains the same types of challenges no matter what continent you’re on. It is STILL, the hardest job you’ll ever love!

I received an e-mail from a young (20-something) woman, newly married and no kids (that she knows of). She had read an advanced copy of my book and got so much more out of it than she (or I) had expected! Without going into the details, she had been receiving pressure from her family about quitting her job when she became a mom. After reading my book, she says she “finally feels released of that pressure.” She went on to say that The ParentPreneur Edge was one of those “…rare ‘reads’ that moved (her) and allowed (her) to learn and grow in ways that (she) truly believes will have an amazingly positive impact on her future.” Wow. I literally cried when I read that. THAT is why I wrote the book - to have a positive impact on others, though admittedly I imagined parents getting the most out of the book. Who knew?! You don’t have to be a parent to get it. That is better than any good book review or media coverage. That is real!

I finally got a chance to see a copy of my book yesterday, the full finished product. It was delivered before noon but I promised my kids I would wait until they got home from school to open the boxes. I have been waiting so long already; it wasn’t hard to put it off for a few more hours. And when I saw the looks on their faces when they saw the boxes from the publisher, I knew I had made the right choice. They were so excited they couldn’t stand it. The looks of pride on their face as they saw their names in print on the dedication page made it all worth the wait. That’s when the tears began to pool in my eyes. Not because it had been such a long and tortuous process or because I had been up nights waiting for the book to be finished, but because like everything, the kids brought it all into perspective. Not that I didn’t relish in the monumental personal satisfaction this accomplishment provided, but experiencing the effect my achievement had on my daughters and the model it gave them for following their own dreams was, well, priceless.

The next milestone will be seeing the book on the shelves in our local Border’s and Barnes and Noble…only a couple more weeks for that one! It should be in all US bookstores by June 22nd. Shortly thereafter, on to Europe and the UK….

A recent study shows that female entrepreneurs are far less likely than their male counterparts to seek angel financing even though the percentage of women owned businesses actually getting funded is not significantly lower than businesses owned by men. In essence, women are not finding angels because they’re not seeking them. So what gives?

One of the authors of the study suggests that perhaps women don’t go to angels because there are so few women angels (a topic that deserves its own discussion!) and we prefer to work with like-minded people. In some ways, I can see his point. Through my past 2+ years of experience helping women to become entrepreneurs through ACTiVATE, I have seen that in general, women do prefer to work with people they are comfortable with. Getting to know a potential business partner on a personal level seems more important to women than to men.

I have other theories that I have developed over the years of working with (and being!) a women entrepreneur as to why women aren’t seeking outside capital to grow their businesses:

1. Women don’t like to ask for help or don’t know where to go for it. There are many of us who feel like we don’t need help…we’ll figure it out. We see asking for help as ‘weak.’ On the other side, so many people I talk to seem to struggle finding the right resources to help them build their concept into a viable business.

2. Many women start businesses for flexibility and control and resist outside assistance that might disrupt that. Taking money from someone to grow a business requires a willingness to give up some control, or at a minimum welcomes outside scrutiny of our efforts. What will an outside investor say if I decide not to go after a big contract because I want to control my growth for personal reasons?

3. They don’t think BIG enough. Prior to starting and growing my business, I just never thought I had the personal or financial resources to consider buying someone else’s business. Perhaps it was a confidence thing. Once I started to see what I could do I started to think “why can’t I?” I began to think bigger. When we were researching our second business, gluten-free snack foods, we even considered buying someone else’s manufacturing facility when we couldn’t find someone to co-manufacture our product and guarantee a wheat/dairy free facility. Five years earlier, that thought would not even have crossed my mind.

So what has stopped you for looking for outside funding? Don’t know how? And if you’re doing it, what do you see as barriers (if any!)? What’s missing?!

I am not a television watcher, but when an idea wakes you up in the wee hours of the morning, the TV offers some company in the otherwise silent night. This morning a rerun of “Roseanne” was on, which I didn’t watch when it was on prime time but was better than being sold on losing 115 pounds in 8 months with a body makeover.

This particular episode had a humorous exchange between two men – one was crying over a lost love and the other was not particularly good at dealing with emotions. His advice to his sobbing friend was to ‘get over it.’ He told him to quit his crying, dust himself off, and move on. What refreshing advice.

How many times do we spend too much energy over-analyzing a failure? It is natural to mourn a loss or be sad when things don’t work out the way we wanted, but to let a disappointment paralyze us or keep us from doing what needs to be done is criminal. Evaluate the situation, learn from it what you can, and move on! Bad things happen and while there are some things we can do nothing about, we can control how we react.

One of my first management hires in my company years ago was a gentleman who had a lot more management experience than I did, but his approach was not consistent with our culture. I gave this man too much leeway and it cost me. He lasted about five months, which was four months too long. In the end, I felt like a failure. However, when I looked at what I learned from it, I realized the lesson was a valuable one and helped me to continue to grow my business.

Successful entrepreneurs have mastered the art of learning from failure. Read Rich Dad Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Before You Quit Your Job and you’ll see how many times he failed but learned from the experience. Sometimes, you can even learn more from a failure than from success – it’s all in how you look at it. So when is the last time you failed? If you’re not failing, you’re not taking enough risks.

Passion is a critical element of successful entrepreneurship…I talk about it everywhere I go. In speeches or in class, I tell my students that you must have passion for what you do. What happens when passion becomes a problem?

Over the past several weeks, I have been obsessed. I am having a problem putting work aside. I have so many ideas in my head that just have to complete, I can’t focus on anything else. I am not even sleeping well (when I do get to bed) and when I am home, I am not really home. The problem is I love what I am doing! I am so excited about it I have thrown myself way out of balance. The good thing is, I know it and can fix it.

I am taking the afternoon off to take my daughters shopping and – get this - I might even take the weekend off! I decided that tasks that feel so urgent now will just have to go undone. I’ve met my outside responsibilities and all that is left is my internal driver to contend with - I can shut her up! I’ll just keep my little notebook with me and write down ideas and to-dos when they hit me and move on. I am officially letting go…at least for a while.

What do you do to let go? Do you do it often enough?