Category: entrepreneurship

adventure, education, entrepreneurship

Step 161: Lateral Action

Christa Avampato

I went to college right out of high school at a prestigious university, finished in 4 years, completing classes in very practical subjects (economics and history, minor in psychology). I got an MBA in general management at another very prestigious university, worked my a** off, and then got a well-paying job right after graduation. By all accounts I architected my career to foster financial independence and my creative spirit, even if some of my decisions in real-time made some people scratch their heads. In the end, I did make the best choices. I was right to make the moves I made. Go me.

And then about a year and a half ago, the bottom fell out of the economy and I started to question what I was doing with my time post-MBA. All the old paradigms about education, career, and making a living crumbled. Then 9 months ago, my apartment building caught fire, I almost lost my life, I did lose almost all of my precious belongings I had worked so hard for, and I began to question everything. This staged questioning lead me to a door I never thought I’d choose again: entrepreneurship. Working for myself. And not just as a freelancer, but building my own company from the ground up – Compass Yoga.

I talked to entrepreneurs, interviewed them, wrote about them, read books, magazines, and blogs, and attended conferences. I built up enough knowledge that I knew I wanted to do this, that I’d be really disappointed with my life if I didn’t at least give it a whirl. And the further I’ve delved into the process, the more I realized that it would be very easy for me to make a bunch of really lousy mistakes because I don’t know what I don’t know. This is all new and I need some guidance, or at least some people around me who are in the same start-up boat.

Kismet set in and a post from Problogger showed up in my inbox on Tuesday about a guy named Brian Clark who pens Copyblogger. I hopped over to Copyblogger and liked what I saw. He was honest, straight-forward, and a very talented writer. He also seemed very genuine in his desire to help brand new or would-be entrepreneurs (i.e., me). He just co-launched an initiative called Lateral Action that will offer a 6-week online entrepreneurship course that offers “everything we would have wanted to know 10 years ago starting out.” His co-founders are a cartoonist and a poet. My kind of folks. Hmmm….I kept reading, skeptically.

Sounded like too much of a line, too much a cliché. And then he said something that opened my mind a bit more. “What is that type of information worth? Well, I personally made squat for about three years getting started. Making even a fraction of my current income back then would be worth a fairly substantial investment given that kind of return. Let me be clear. We’re not looking for just anyone with a credit card. Rather, we’re interested in working with motivated people who will take action with these methods.”

Okay, now I’m really listening. What sold me was that I sent an email to one of the co-founders and he responded within a few minutes. I told him about Compass Yoga and a bit about my professional background as a product developer. He told me why the class would be completely worthwhile for me and that one of his inspirations (and friend) is Jonathan Fields, the person who founded Sonic Yoga (where I just completed my yoga teacher training.)

All these pieces bundled together – the fact that I need some more guidance in starting MY business (not just any business), Brian’s authentic voice, Mark’s responsiveness, and the Jonathan Fields connection – made me realize that I stumbled upon something that is far more valuable than the small class fee. I just downloaded the first few modules, and I’m going to comb through them this weekend. I’ll let you know how it goes. This just may change my tune about online education.

Have you ever had an experience that caused you to change a long-held belief? If so, I’d love to hear about it!

I don’t know who created the cartoon above, though if I had to place a bet, I’d say it was Tony Clark, the cartoonist who is a co-founder of Lateral Action. The cartoon is from their site and I think it’s hilarious (and true-to-life).

business, courage, entrepreneurship, yoga

Step 151: Shouting Dreams

Christa Avampato

Courage means being scared to death…and saddling up anyway. ~ John Wayne

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow”. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

These two quotes were used by two of my lovely yoga teacher training pals, Vivian and Courtney, during their practicums on our last day of class. They have stuck with me this past week, and I thought of them often as I considered what I will do now that we have completed our 200 hour training. My friend, Amanda, reminded me of them again when she wrote a blog post this week about prayers and challenges and courage. Amanda shouts out dreams in her post in her articulate, poetic voice, and that voice inspired me to shout my dreams, too.

Dreams have their greatest power once articulated publicly. So here goes my professional dream: “By my 35th birthday next year, I want to earn at least half of my income from my own business.” And look, I didn’t self-destruct by making that proclamation; I actually brought it a little closer into being.

At the start of her teaching career, my yoga teacher, Johanna, worked so hard building her business though she completely avoided making a website, a key piece of her marketing plan. Later, she realized she had some pent-up fear about putting herself out into the world in such a public manner. Once she released the fear, she built the site (which is beautiful!) and she has a thriving career now. She saddled up when she was scared to death, and it paid off in spades.

I took a cue from Jo and built my website for my business, Compass Yoga, in a few days. I could have labored over it some more before flipping the switch, scrutinizing every word. I could have hired a copy writer, a professional web designer, and a graphic designer, delaying the launch and spending a lot of money in the process. Instead, I just used what I know how to do from my own blog, bought a domain for $14.97, wrote all of the copy myself, and stepped on the gas. It’s totally me, mistakes and all. As Dr. Seuss would say, I had to get on my way.

Thank you Jo, John Wayne, Mary Anne Radmacher, Vivian, Courtney, and Amanda, for inspiring me this week to just close my eyes and jump and shout from the hilltops how I want my career to unfold. I’m scared to death and it feels great!

Take a look at the Compass Yoga site and let me know what you think!

entrepreneurship, New York City, technology

Step 146: The Inspiring Story of Start-up My City Way

Christa Avampato

As a blogger I am constantly introduced to new, interesting people who are bringing their ideas to life. My friend, Erica Heinz, over at Yogoer.com recently introduced me to her friend, Sonpreet Bhatia, Co-Founder of My City Way. My City Way creates mobile phone apps that roll up 50+ hyper-local apps into a city-specific guide. Tailored for use by local residents and visitors alike, My City Way is a tour guide in your pocket.

From our first email, Sonpreet impressed me with her passion and ability to see beyond what’s already out there in the world. The mobile landscape is highly competitive with a constant stream of new competitors. Just when we think we’ve got our head wrapped around its potential, some entrepreneur mixes it up again with a new innovation. My City Way did just that in a big, useful way.

In February, Bhatia and Co-founders Puneet Mehta and Archana Patchirajan took home the prestigious Popular Choice and Investors’ Choice Awards at the NYC BigApps Competition for the company’s first app, NYCWay. Since then, the trio has launched a similar app in a host of other cities including San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Boston, and London. My City Way has also been busy working away on new features to delight its customers including a reservation service, discounts and deals on local merchants, up-to-the-minute public transit info, wi-fi locations, even apartment and job listings.

My City Way’s founders were focused on using technology to create something that would help local businesses manage through this difficult recession. They wanted to put something in the hands of tech savvy consumers that would direct consumer spending to local businesses, particularly those that don’t have lavish marketing budgets. Whether you believe in karma or the idea that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, their ingenuity and drive paid off. With the success and rapid growth of My City Way, all three founders left their lucrative jobs on Wall Street earlier this year to focus on this startup. They never looked back and that keeps me looking forward, too.

My City Way is available for iPhone, iPad, and Android phones. For more info, check them out at http://www.mycityway.com

business, education, entrepreneurship, social change, social entrepreneurship

Step 144: Sparkseed Supports Social Innovators at American Universities

Christa Avampato

A few months ago, I featured Jerri Chou from All Day Buffet and Teju Ravilochan from the Unreasonable Institute. Jerri and Teju’s optimism in action inspired me to continue seeking out social entrepreneurs who believe that the greatest positive impact on society can be made when we create opportunities for people to use their personal passions to do well and do good at the same time.

I virtually met Mike Del Ponte as a result of my interviews with Jerri and Teju. He emailed me to educate me about his initiative, Sparkseed, which invests in American college students who aspire to be tomorrow’s social entrepreneurs. They have ideas to change the world, and Sparkseed helps them get there by providing a unique blend of services including pro-bono consulting, mentoring, and seed money.

I meet a lot of social entrepreneurs with inspiring stories. Mike’s ability to combine his business savvy with his passion for and personal experience with social entrepreneurship is a rare gift. “When I was at Yale I launched a social venture and soon found that I had to teach myself everything: how to form the corporation, how to recruit and manage a team, how to pitch to investors, etc…I had to reinvent the wheel and wasted a lot of time…I noticed that almost all student innovators run into the same problem…Sparkseed was established to give young social entrepreneurs everything they need to fulfill their potential as change agents.”

The Financial Times recently awarded Sparkseed with its prestigious Best Social Investment Strategy award. To date, Sparkseed has funded over 50 social enterprise projects from a wide variety of fields:

Elecar Inc.: Founded by Brown University student Andrew Antar, Elecar is working to provide the missing piece to the electric car puzzle. By developing residential charging station and an online payment system, Elecar is laying a cost-effective framework to facilitate the mass adoption of electric cars.

MaloTraders: Founded by Temple University student Mohamed Ali Niang, MaloTraders specializing in the processing, storing, and marketing of rice for small-scale farmers in Mali. By making local production more competitive on the international market, MaloTrade is working to alleviate poverty.

Paper Feet: Founded by University of Michigan student Jimmy Tomczak, Paper Feet makes the world’s thinnest and most flexible flip-flop out of recycled billboard vinyl. Every year, 10,000 tons of billboard vinyl ends up in landfills. Paper Feet is addressing this problem by rolling out a line of hip products all made from up-cycled waste.

Get involved and be inspired! Learn more about Sparkseed and its incredible stable of social entrepreneurs by visiting the organization’s website, joining the Facebook page, and following on Twitter.

adventure, business, entrepreneurship, fear, feelings, yoga

Step 113: F.E.A.R.

Christa Avampato

“F.E.A.R. – false evidence appearing real.” ~ Tracy, my yoga teacher

Whenever I have class with my yoga teacher, Tracy, I keep my pen close by. She always has pearls of wisdom that she carefully places before us as an offering, wisdom that has been passed down to her from her own practice and meditation and her teachers. Last night she laid the quote above before us and asked us to consider why we would hold any fear at all give this acronym. I couldn’t think of any good reasons.

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of letting our thoughts get the best of us. Certainly they should make us considerate of our actions, though we can’t allow them to prevent us from finding our true way. Lately I’ve been feeling my way toward my path with a little more spring in my step than usual. I’m growing increasingly aware that my life’s work, that elusive things I’ve been rummaging around for, is just around the corner, and so every day I wake up with the feeling that today might be the day when all these pieces that seem to be heading toward one another finally coalesce so beautifully that I wonder why I didn’t see their connection all along.

Every once in a while I catch myself believing in my false evidence appearing positive: “There are lots of yoga teachers in this city, all over the world. What will you do that’s so different?” or “There are people who are professionally trained industrial designers who develop products. How can you produce something as elegant as their work?” During my 18 minutes of meditation a day, my mind’s eye recognizes these F.E.A.R.s, acknowledges them, and then politely moves on. This doesn’t mean they go away completely; I certainly have moments of self-doubt. Can I really make a go of my own business? Can I really offer up something special and unique? And the answer I keep hearing, “well what else are you going to do with your time here if not create something special and unique.” Prana has a sense of humor. And it’s blunt. It’s got no time for messing around.

So I’ve started cranking along, planting lots and lots of seeds in all of this rich soil in my life. Every once in a while an early shoot sprouts up, I go over and water it, and despite my best efforts it just doesn’t root down properly. That’s okay. I thank it for making an appearance, showing me a way, knowing that its possibility put me one step closer to finding my way.

False evidence is all around us, and its a very good actor. But if we take the time to really sift through, to really match up the opportunities we find with what we truly want, it’s easy to detect which options are distractions and which ones we really need to cultivate. The next little adventure I’ll be cultivating is a trip to Santorini, Greece for a yoga retreat and teacher training with Shiva Rea. I have been looking for a retreat for some time now that really offer a nice combo of downtime and practice, in a place I’ve never been, with a teacher I really respect and admire. It just happened to work out that the week Shiva’s going is the perfect time for me to take a vacation, the price is perfect, and the theme “radical relaxation” is just what my curious soul needs. Synchronicity: a sure sign that I’m going exactly where I need to be. F.E.A.R.s be gone…

The image above is not my own. It depicts the sunset in Santorini, Greece, hopefully similar to the ones I’ll be seeing very soon. It can be found here.

entrepreneurship, Examiner

Examiner interview: Laura Sandall, President of Gold Marketing Group

Christa Avampato

Exciting stuff on Examiner.com today – my interview with Laura Sandall, President of Gold Marketing Group. After 20 years at Target, inventing the modern-day concept of a pop-up store, she struck out on her own. Her story is full of courage and wise advice on going your own way. Check it out – click here for the full story.

entrepreneurship, Examiner, New York City, technology

Examiner.com: My Interview with Adam Rich, Co-founder of Thrillist.com

Christa Avampato

Looking for the latest great place to dine, shop, or hang in New York City? Look no further than Thrillist, a free daily email with one fabulous suggestion after another. I recently had the opportunity to connect with Adam Rich, one of the co-founders, to get the inside scoop on their start-up.

Many thanks to Flavie Bagnol, Director of Communications, for making the arrangements for this interview. For the full interview, click here.

entrepreneurship, Examiner

Examiner.com: My interview with Jerri Chou, Co-founder of All Day Buffet

Christa Avampato

Meet Jerri Chou, Co-founder of All Day Buffet, an organization whose mission is “to change the world through creativity and business. We incubate, advise, and invest into for-profit/for-good companies.”

Under the All Day Buffet umbrella, you’ll find some kickin’ business initiatives like The Feast Conference, an innovation event that will get your creative juices flowing like the Mississippi, By/Association, a mechanism to introduce remarkable people to one another, and their latest creation TBD, a free email newsletter that delivers one world-shaking idea and one collective action to improve our future. It’s this latest venture that sparked my recent conversation with Jerri.

To read the full interview with Jerri, please click here.

entrepreneurship, Examiner, food

Examiner.com: Interview with Danielle Di Vecchio, Founder of bakery Biscotti di Vecchio

Christa Avampato

I learned about Danielle Di Vecchio and her business, Biscotti di Vecchio through Crain’s story about online bakeries. Danielle had been making sinfully delicious biscotti for years and giving them away as gifts. Her grandmother taught her to make these traditional Italian cookies, a staple of every Italian kitchen. (Coming from an Italian family myself, my grandmother always had chocolate and vanilla biscotti for us to nibble on. I distinctly remember their scent and place in her kitchen.) Family and friends encouraged Danielle to form a business based on her baking hobby. Danielle’s biscotti, made from the finest, all-natural ingredients, make perfect holiday gifts.

For the interview, click here.

books, business, change, dreams, entrepreneurship, money

My Year of Hopefulness – Unquestioned Answers

Christa Avampato

While in Costa Rica, I continued reading Lynne Twist’s book The Soul of Money. So many of her sentiments about the use of money, sufficiency, and abundance have resonated with me. At the end of one particular chapter she challenges readers to explore not unanswered questions, but unquestioned answers. I have not been able to get this term out of my head. I spent a long night in Costa Rica, tossing and turning, wrestling with the unquestioned answers in my own professional life.

Since going to business school, I have been on a track – to pay back my loans, to believe that I must make a certain amount of money in my single paycheck, to climb, climb, climb as high as I can in the field of business. We hear so often that there are not enough women at the very top of business world, that people from my socioeconomic background are under-represented and needed in large corporations, as are those who embrace empathy and innovation and change. Up until now, I assumed that these sentiments were a given, answers to timeless questions and concerns in business, and that I must heed this call.

With this latest economic downturn, these very things that I have held to be true without question are now up for scrutiny. Everything is up for debate. I went to an innovation conference several weeks ago, hosted by Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Business. My former boss, Bob, invited me because he knows of my deep interest in change and design. Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO and one of the panelists at the conference, discussed the dilemma of big business today as it relates to change. IDEO runs workshops throughout the year that are training sessions for business people to encourage more creativity within their companies. They are wildly popular events, and there’s only one problem with them. “Once people open up their minds to the world of design,” Brown said, “they can never go back. Many times, attendees of our workshops leave their jobs shortly after they complete the sessions. They can’t accept a life in typical big corporations anymore. They know better.”

Big corporations have been trying so hard to make innovation and change a part of the culture, or at least trying hard to pay lip-service to change. The difficulty is that only a handful of corporations really believe in the power and necessity of change. Target, Apple, Nike are among the few. By and large most big corporations just want to return to the good old days of fat profits, zero regulation, and big, big bonuses. Those individuals who really want change, innovation, and design to be incorporated into the fabric of a company get too frustrated with bureaucracy and the slow, lumbering gait of a company strangled by its own size. And so, they leave for smaller, more nimble, freer pastures. Who could blame them?

These are the brave souls questioning the answers that business has for so long assumed to be universal truths. Now, the truth is not quite so clear as it once was. The people who have long-benefited from business as usual (so much so that BAU has become a common acronym in their lexicon) are getting very nervous because their lifestyle is being threatened by those asking why, those who are questioning the ‘given’ answers.

For those brave enough to ask why, their dilemma now lies not in how to get their ideas heard by the ones who phone it in, but whether or not it’s even worth it to ask why at all. Many are leaving to build their own dreams, to bet on themselves rather than on a big corporation. The world of business should be afraid. To survive in this new economy, corporations need the questioners much more than the questioners need the big corporations.

I laid in my bed, realizing that these questioners are the next great breed of entrepreneurs, the next batch of people who are on the verge of jumping from the safe, secure cliff and changing the world as we know it. And then I asked myself the question, “Will I be brave enough to count myself among them?” I waited long into the night for an answer to come from the darkness, and with the sun my own heart rose up to speak a quiet, strong, clear “yes”.