Digital Tools

It's me...in book form. With pretty graphics and chic fonts and oodles of business wisdom. "155 Words You Need to Know: Practical Wisdom for Creative Entrepreneurs" is my awesome new print book (Hold it in your hot little hands! Mark it up with highlighters! Dog-ear your favorite passages!) It's the culmination of all the times I longed for a mentor to help navigate the dizzying maze of entrepreneurship. It’s the wisdom that sprung from the countless times someone asked a question during a meeting using a term I'd never before heard. Furiously scribbled foreign words were scrawled across paper and evenings were spent knee-deep in Google® searches to give them context and meaning. This wisdom didn’t come from textbooks or sitting through a class; it was hard-won and personally developed through years of trial and error, victories and stumbles, triumphs and tribulations.

My motto for 2013? JFDI. No excuses. No procrastination. No fear. I asked my old friend Andy Vastagh of Boss Construction in Nashville, TN to design a poster I can frame for my office to remind me daily that I am the sister in charge here and that it's up to me to put on my "big girl" panties and get the hell on with it. He rose to the challenge with a gorgeous hand-pulled silkscreen print that set my heart a flutter. Creative entrepreneurs from every corner of the web clamored for one, too and- well, here we are. Signed. Numbered. Limited edition. JFDI, baby!

Price-O-Matic is an innovative software package for makers and creative entrepreneurs, developed exclusively by Lucky Break Consulting. It takes the guesswork out of product pricing by crunching the numbers for you to create a systematic pricing strategy that ensures profitability across multiple distribution models. It was developed by my wicked smart husband (an engineer with over a decade of experience at one of the world’s leading tech companies), who answered my entrepreneurial clarion call with a piece of knock-your-socks-off software that will save the livers of makers struggling to successfully price their products. Now available for pre-order... to be delivered on Tuesday, May 28th!

Copycats got you down? I feel you, sister. Truly. Creative entrepreneurs of all stripes often find themselves sucked into intellectual property grudge matches. Have your pictures popped up on someone else's website? Or maybe your webcopy has been lifted and used to sell products which obviously aren't yours. Even worse, did someone take a particularly robust dose of inspiration from your playbook to launch similar products, marketed in a strikingly familiar fashion? Though it happens to the best of us, I'm of the firm opinion that imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. I've battled the infringement beast on numerous occasions, forking over princely sums to my intellectual property attorney in order to protect the products in which I've invested my blood, sweat and tears. Those experiences are the genesis of this innovative virtual class, designed for savvy entrepreneurs who want to: a) ensure they're building an original brand they can protect and b) guard that brand from scofflaws who want to piggyback on their hard work.

If your prevailing media strategy has been to jump up and down, rabidly flailing your arms and praying that magazines and bloggers will eventually take notice, please- for the love of all things holy- have a glass of water and take a seat. Public relations isn’t about throwing everything you have at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s about clarifying your story, refining your pitch, building a targeted media list, anticipating media requests and creating the tools necessary to satisfy those press inquiries at the speed of lightning. At the conclusion of this class, you’ll know precisely what editors are looking for and how to deliver it with ease to score ridiculously fabulous press hits across a variety of digital and traditional media.

This is my white-hot HR arsenal and I’m packing major heat. Fab interview questions, a sample application, scripts for gently declining an applicant, plus a myriad of tools to standardize policies and get your new teammate(s) up and running in record time. Culled from my own research, consultations with employment lawyers and my decade of experience managing a team of more people than you have fingers on both hands, this knowledge has been simmered down to its essence and compiled for your convenience. 46 pages of solid-gold wisdom + templates + forms to empower you to build a dream team and take over the world.