Recipe for Success

So how young is too young to start your entrepreneurial endeavors?

Certainly you can sell lemonade on the sidewalk or bake homemade cookies and sell them on the street, but that’s just kid’s stuff, right? They’re not “real” businesses.

You’d think, but that is not what one little girl thought.
Now let this little girl inspire your big dreams.

Dee grew up in a Catholic working-class family in Oakland, California. Her father was a welder and her mother raised Dee and her sisters to become good wives and mothers. As Dee grew up she held a burning desire to be special, to do something different.

Dee was a mediocre student, but she learned to work hard. Dee graduated from high school and then worked at various jobs before fulfilling her mom’s vision for her by marrying at 19 years old.

For about a year as a new wife, Dee tried to fit into her husband’s world as a dutiful spouse. She hosted visitors and made polite conversation. But she was out of her element. Pretending to be someone else made her decide 

to do something else with her life. It was in that moment she realized she wanted to succeed in her own element. She concluded, “I couldn’t be in my husband’s shadow anymore. I didn’t want to be his tagalong. I needed to change, to become an independent self-respecting individual able to stand on my two feet.”

Dee decided to start a business based on the only thing she had done as a girl. From age 13 she had baked chocolate chip cookies and sold them to her family, friends and neighbors.

Her husband’s business acquaintances loved her cookies, so she asked them what they thought about starting a cookie business. “Bad idea,” they said with their mouths stuffed full of cookies. “Never work,” they said, “Forget it.” Even Dee’s mother, her in-laws, and her friends and schoolmates also said she would fail.

Undeterred, at age 20, Dee started her first cookie store. As she walked out the door to open the store for her very first day, her husband said she wouldn’t sell $50 worth of cookies.

She opened promptly at 9 a.m., but by noon nobody had bought even one cookie. Frustrated and afraid to fail, she took samples to people on the streets. They liked the samples and returned to actually buy cookies. By the end of the day she rang up $75 in sales. Take that hubby!

In fact, her husband, an economist with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University, would eventually join her “silly” little cookie business, as it was doing FAR better than his own.

The Dee I am talking about is of course Debbi Fields of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Founded in 1977, her “silly little cookie business” grew to more than 600 stores earning more than $150 million in revenue and employing several thousand people. Not bad for a woman whose dreams started as a 13-year-old entrepreneur.

Kinda makes you wonder what our excuse is, right?

Decide right now, what excuse did you have to give up or are going to give up right now in order to unleash your greater success?

Source: http://darrenhardy.success.com/2013/02/recipe-for-success/