Mommy Millionaire: How I Turned My Kitchen Table Idea into a Million Dollars and How You Can, Too!

INTRODUCTION

How did you turn that kitchen table idea of yours into a million dollars? It’s a question I hear everywhere I go as I tour the country on business as president of Green Daisy, Inc. Whether I’m at trade shows in cities across the United States or at lectures I give to women’s and community groups, everyone wants an answer to that question!

It became clear to me that there was a real need for a How to Make a Million Dollars book. You don’t need to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to make a million dollars on the next big thing. Becoming a millionaire is not about luck, being a genius, or having any special talents. You don’t have to be selling the next high-tech invention to get rich. You can do it with something as simple as a Wuvit! What’s a Wuvit? A simple little gift I made at my kitchen table that I turned into a million dollars in just over three years.

There has been no shortage of books in the last few years telling you how to think like a millionaire, but just thinking like a millionaire is not enough. The truth is, people only learn to think like a millionaire by becoming one. Read this book, and you’ll see step by step how I went from a stay-at-home mommy to a Mommy Millionaire, and every lesson I learned along the way.

It’s About Time Someone Wrote This Book!

This book is not just about how to become a millionaire; it’s about how to become a millionaire while putting your family first. Being a mommy entrepreneur is a lot like being Ginger Rogers—doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards in high heels, while making it look effortless. My workday as president of Green Daisy, Inc., is routinely interrupted by numerous requests from my kids, like Can I have chocolate milk? and Can I buy a BB gun? And you know what? That’s a good thing! Seeing my children’s smiling faces throughout the workday is one of the perks of being a Mommy Millionaire.

This is the twenty-first century. Technology has empowered us in new and liberating ways, which will radically transform the nine-to-five workday world. Never before has it been so distinctly possible for us, as women, to have it all.

Before you get it all, you’re going to need some handy rules to keep you sane and focused on what’s really important—your family—that I carved out from years of first apologizing for my kids, then celebrating them. Before these rules, I’d routinely shush my kids when a business call came in, running into the bathroom while they cried and pleaded on the other side of the door. Now, anyone who calls me during business hours will likely have the privilege of hearing my six-year-old, home from morning kindergarten, scream that he wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while I have a phone meeting. For a complete list of all my Mommy Millionaire Rules, designed to make your life a whole lot easier and less stressful as you chase down your million dollars, keep reading.

Debunking the Myth

It’s true that a few successful woman entrepreneurs, Mommy Millionaires like Martha Stewart, have gone before, paving the way for those who would follow, while creating an unrealistic image of a supersuccessful mom, to which many of us aspire. From the outside, these women appeared to have achieved success effortlessly, baking, sewing, or "make-overing their way to million-dollar empires. In fact, part of the illusion is deliberately creating a brand that makes it appear that their success was but a happy coincidence of motherhood, stumbled upon by accident while hosting dinner parties, sewing pajamas up as a lark after having a baby, or helping friends with makeup tips in the privacy of their own homes. I, however, discovered that becoming a millionaire like Martha Stewart had a lot less to do with being a perfect stay-at-home mom and a lot more to do with Herculean workloads, grassroots marketing tours, and the deft manipulating of smoke and mirrors to create an image of a perfect mom and homemaker as a means to sell product, something commonly referred to as lifestyle marketing. I meet many women across America who have a great idea that could be the next big thing but have no idea what it really takes to grow an idea to a million dollars. I’m here to debunk the myths of Mommy Millionaire to which I succumbed and to show those of you who have one good idea and want to turn it into the Next Million-Dollar Idea how to accomplish your goal while still attending PTA meetings and school parties and gazing into the adorable, smiling faces of your kids throughout each day.

The Next Women’s Revolution

New census data tell us that there is a dramatic new trend: women turning in historic numbers to the option of entrepreneurship.

• There are an estimated u million women-owned companies in the U.S., which is nearly half of all privately held firms, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research, and by 2025 the U.S. Census Bureau projects the number to rise to 55 percent.

• Women are starting businesses today at two times the rate of men, and the growth rate of women-owned firms regularly outpaces overall business growth, according to the National Foundation for Women Business Owners.

This is an extremely exciting time for women entrepreneurs, who are entering the business world in record numbers. Women are forging into the uncharted domain of woman entrepreneurship with a new spirit of freedom and independence, bettering their lives and the economic well-being of the entire country. No doubt we’ll change a few rules along the way about work and family during this revolution as we did about sex and gender roles in the seventies.

The Rise of the Woman Entrepreneur

The fact is, more mommies than ever are entering the world of entrepreneurship. And why not? Who knows better what America’s consumer culture needs next than the ultimate consumers—mothers, usually women in their thirties who control most of a household’s buying decisions and power the American economy with their spending habits. Women are just starting to penetrate the world of entrepreneurship in significant numbers. Sure, there were a few pioneering figures before us, Martha Stewart being the most famous of all—vilified for her determination, perfectionism, drive, and singular devotion to work, which, by the way, are indispensable attributes you’ll surely need to make a million. The sheer number of women choosing to become entrepreneurs is remarkable. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of women-owned businesses grew 20 percent between 1997 and 2002, twice the national average for all businesses. The nearly 11 million women-owned businesses generated more than $940 billion in revenue, up 15 percent from 1997.

Why Are All These Women Starting Their Own Businesses?

There are many different reasons, but the desire to spend more time with their kids than a nine-to-five job in the corporate world would allow is no doubt number one. This became most apparent to me when I was standing outside the gates at QVC at a national cattle call they call a New Product Search, in Orlando, Florida, when I heard a woman in line say, "I wish there was a book telling us how these moms you hear about make millions on their ideas, not just that they did it, but how they did it, every little detail about what it took to turn their little kitchen table idea into millions!" Standing before me were hundreds of entrepreneurs, men, women, old and young, some dressed in suits, some in cut-off shorts and flip-flops, all taking their turn in a long line that snaked around the elegant hotel’s mezzanine, waiting for their golden moment of opportunity when they would stand before a QVC buyer and have ten precious minutes to pitch their product. This was my second trek across the country in pursuit of what most considered the American Idol of retailing, and I, unlike the other itinerant millionaires in the making, felt some ease knowing what would be expected of me once the line had fed me into that brightly lit room filled with long rows of tables, each row broken up into ten six-foot sections on which to present your product. I considered the woman who had made the plea for a guidebook on how to become a Mommy Millionaire and wanted to answer her right then and there, Just give me a few months to write it! But it was her turn to forge into that brightly lit room, her shot at becoming an overnight success, as so many of these budding entrepreneurs believed was the promise being held before them, and she tidied her wheeled apparel rack of prototype drawings and rolled it into the room before I could steel her with one word of advice.

What was it about QVC that brought out all the dreamers, all the cashstrapped inventors, all the get rich quick idealists, all the moms—waiting in line with their cute matching costumes and bright feather boas, serving up homemade cookies, doll clothes, and hand-painted shoes while pushing their kids in strollers? What made people drive or fly across the country with nothing but an invention still just on paper or a passed-down family recipe for fudge with dreams of selling out in record time as Today’s Special Value, checking into hotels with their parents’ credit cards? According to QVC’s own Marilyn Montross, it was because a few could go virtually overnight from somebody with a product and a dream to somebody with a very large company. Case in point, Jeanne Bice, founder of the Quacker Factory, who appeared on QVC the first time eleven years ago with two embellished T-shirts, and who now makes regular appearances showcasing entire collections at least four times a year, accomplishing millions of dollars of sales. It’s easy to be seduced by the success stories, but the truth is that QVC can break you just as fast as it can make you. Only a very small percentage of the thousands of products that try out are chosen for on-air presentation, and even fewer result in Bice’s success. I personally know more entrepreneurs who have faced financial crisis taking back returned product, which they may have custom-manufactured to fill QVC Purchase Orders, than I know who have experienced success. Getting on air is one thing; selling out of your product is a whole other. If indeed you don’t record resounding sales success in your first three minutes of airtime, you could be sent home without a second chance, with all the product you shipped in advance of your appearance returned. In many cases, QVC requires a guaranteed sale, which means that they won’t pay for your product unless you sell it all. For every one person I know who has made a pile of cash on QVC, I know ten who have not. It’s a lottery and for that lucky one-in-a-million product can deliver a jackpot. You actually have much better odds at success with the nation’s conventional retailers than on QVC. Still, QVC persists in the minds of everybody just starting out as the end-all and be-all of retailing. Go after it, that’s for sure, but if they don’t select you, don’t think that’s the end. In fact, their rejection marked just the beginning for me.

To learn more about how to get your product on QVC, including how to successfully participate in a Product Search event or how to find an independent marketing representative specializing in QVC, read chapter 9 and visit QVC’s Web site, www.qvcproductsearch.com.

QVC PRODUCT SEARCH—THE AMERICAN IDOL OF RETAIL

• In total, products discovered by QVC have generated more than $1 billion in sales since 1995.

• QVC reaches over 87 million homes in the United States.

• The four cardinal criteria for a successful QVC product:

1. Is the product unique?

2. Does it demonstrate well?

3. Does it save time or solve a problem?

4. Is it timely or topical?

The How to Make a Million Dollars

Instruction Manual

Everything happens for a reason. That is one of the most essential and surest rules of business that I have distilled from my experience on the roller-coaster ride that is entrepreneurship. The plea by a stranger for an instruction manual on how to turn her kitchen table idea into a million dollars uttered out loud seemed providential. That was me, two years ago, I thought. I, too, was once seduced by the lure of quick success that QVC seemed to represent to mommies all over the U.S. Someone had to stop this insanity! Someone had to write the instruction manual this woman demanded.

If you’re one of millions of budding entrepreneur moms every year who have made the choice to stay at home with their young children—or are thinking of leaving careers to do so—and you’re looking for a book that tells you every step to turning your great idea into a million dollars, filled with practical business advice, you came to the right place. This is a business book for mommy or even daddy wannabe entrepreneurs, full of real-life savvy that nobody else will tell you, knowledge that other successful lifestyle marketers definitely don’t want you to know. Mommy Millionaire is full of inside secrets on how to:

• Write a business plan.

• Develop and fund your idea.

• Get on QVC.

• Break down the doors of big retailers.

• Take it to the streets—launching your product into the national marketplace.

• Develop the power of a story and the will to drive it.

• Get free publicity.

• Devise and execute an exit strategy that will net you millions upon the sale of your company just years after start-up.

In these pages, you will find step-by-step directions on how not to fail and, more important, how to succeed.

Free Money! Where Is It and How Do I Get It?

The Untold Secrets About Getting Free Money

for Start-up

This information alone is worth the price of this book. Take it from me, I’ve been there and done this! There is more to this story than meets the eye. But wait, there’s more! Mommy Millionaire will tell you the essentials of running a business that you can’t learn in schools, explaining once and for all what mommies and daddies alike need to know about entrepreneurial success.

SECRETS TO DOING BUSINESS NO ONE WILL TELL YOU

• Why you never pay anyone in thirty days.

• How to fund your business with personal credit cards.

• The secrets of marketing.

• The tricks to using numbers to your advantage.

• How to create your own B.S. Detection Machine and run everything through it first to avoid being scammed.

• Secrets of doing business with big retailers.

• How to create a killer Web site for almost no money and with no knowledge of HTML.

• Trade-show secrets nobody will tell you that will save you thousands of dollars!

There are also a few indispensable rules that I’ve put together from my own experience, designed to help you take shortcuts to your own success.

TEN RULES FOR DOING BUSINESS

1. Don’t apologize for being a mom.

2. When dealing with someone in business, always ask yourself, What’s in it for them?

3. Pay your attorney for advice only. Most of the paperwork you can do yourself (including setting up your corporation, registering your trademarks, and even writing your own patent).

4. Find a mentor. Having someone who’s been there and done that can really help you get through tough times and understand it’s part of the territory.

5. Remember that nobody ever got rich by spending money, and understand what overcapitalization is and how to avoid it.

6. Have a story. Everybody loves a good story.

7. Create a pitch and cold-call! Nothing has been more effective for me than cold-calling major accounts.

8. Realize that everything happens for a reason. Accept challenge, conquer it, and learn from it.

9. Learn the $20,000 Rule: what it really takes to fund even the smallest business start-up.

10. Believe in yourself!

My Story, in a Nutshell

My own odyssey began nearly three years ago when my husband was laid off. He was running out of unemployment benefits in a job market that was decimated. I had to find a way to support our family! I was making a novel little product I had invented at my kitchen table and that people were crazy about. After giving it as a Christmas present to my kids’ teachers, I found myself inundated with phone calls from strangers who wanted one, eventually selling hundreds of them off the back of my truck wherever I went: to the bank, the YMCA, my kids’ schools, my neighborhood pool. My husband took the product to a local gift store without telling me and asked the owner if she would try selling them on consignment. She did and sold out of them in a week. I like to say the rest is history, and unfortunately, that is what most successful woman entrepreneurs would want you to believe, attaching market value to their Mommy Millionaire Mystique, but the reality is that what followed was years of stunning success, exciting and challenging hard work, and the narrow escape from bankruptcy. Unfortunately, narrowly escaping bankruptcy or the near collapse of your business is frequently not the exception but the rule.

BUSINESS 101

Current research shows that the cold, hard facts about starting a business are brutal and inescapable. One-third of new businesses will fail in two years. Fifty-six percent will fail in four years. Everyone obviously needs all the help they can get!. Mommy Millionaire will show wannabe millionaire entrepreneurs everywhere the approach that is necessary for a business to survive and thrive. This is my own real-life account that will tell you exactly what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur, both physically and emotionally.

Who Needs to Read This Book?

Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, you’ll find the story of how I took my funny-sounding product to millions of dollars in sales an inspiration, including how I successfully launched my product into the national retail landscape by adopting a grassroots marketing approach and personally traveling to stores across the country to do in-store Demo Events. You’ll get all the details, including how I:

• Invented a million-dollar product at my kitchen table on a free sewing machine.

• Created my own brand.

• Registered my own trademark.

• Drafted my own patent.

• Built my own Web site.

• Turned my funny-sounding product into a national brand overnight.

What It Really Takes to Think Rich

Having millionaire mentors is what taught me to see opportunity—to think rich—and to recognize the tough choices and smart decisions that led to their financial success. How many of you have millionaire friends for mentors? If you do, how many of those millionaires are willing to tell you every single secret they learned the hard way for free—including all the stuff nobody wants to admit? Mommy Millionaire will. I’ll reveal the missing steps between wanting success and achieving it, between desiring a million dollars and getting it.

You Need to Read This Book

I go beyond the myth of the overnight millionaire to the reality to show the blood, sweat, and tears behind the creation of a Mommy Millionaire. With useful lists of resources that offer help to owners and prospective owners of new businesses and my own account that gets to the heart of what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur, Mommy Millionaire is necessary reading for those fascinated by business and eager to create their own million, or anyone interested in a personal story of risk, hardship, and personal and financial transformation.

1

THE IDEA:

MY OWN INCREDIBLE

STORY

Discerning opportunity in the days mundane moments is the instinct necessary to entrepreneurial survival; having the courage and the ability to act upon opportunity is what essentially separates those who succeed from those who fail.

Risk Equals Reward—Big Risk Equals Big Reward

How do you turn your kitchen table idea into a million dollars? How do you become a successful entrepreneur? There are many books that detail all the abilities and strengths that need to be brought to the task, but it’s not so much a question of competence as one of entrepreneurial character. You could bring with you every word of wisdom and degrees from venerable Ivy League colleges on how to succeed to the threshold as an entrepreneur, but without the necessary willingness to take a calculated risk, you could not take the first step toward that exciting and mysterious frontier of risk and reward.

There is no reward without risk, and the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.

KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR

• Persistent

• Competitive

• Goal-oriented

• Self-confident

• Willing to take a calculated risk

• Creative

• Possessing strong vision

Don t worry if you don’t have all of these characteristics starting out—I didn’t!

To some people—a couple of whom will no doubt be family members—the willingness to embark upon a path of risk will be perceived on one day as courage, on the next as foolish abandon, and on another as insanity. At the very beginning, I was walking in the darkness of faith and not the light of reason. There was no way I could communicate my expectations to friends and family—I just had a gut feeling that I would be successful and I had to follow my gut. Many told me I would fail. Let’s face it; vision is a gift of the dreamer, and not everyone was born to dream. People had been laughing at dreamers for aeons before I came along. I’m sure a lot of people laughed at Bill Gates when he dropped out of college to pursue some little business he had going on in his garage.

I Was No Bill Gates

The little project on the side I was working on in my basement was laughably simple. In fact, no one took me seriously, and why should they have? It was literally a bag of corn! The whole invention itself was a complete accident. I was a stay-at-home mom with two boys, aged two and four, who was just looking for something clever to give to her kids’ teachers for a Christmas present. My husband was feeding deer in the backyard of our sprawling tree-lined suburban neighborhood. What did we know? We were city kids with our first official house with a certified yard! I saw a fifty-pound bag of corn he had left standing upright next to my sewing machine and a lightbulb went off in my head. I had heard of rice in socks, surely corn would be better: It had a bigger grain that would hold on to heat longer. I put the corn in a hastily sewn pillowcase, heated it up in the microwave for a couple of minutes, then took it out and held it against my chest. I was blown away by the wave of soothing moist heat that enveloped my body.

The Eureka Moment: When Inspiration Meets Invention

I was overtaken by something that can only be described as a fever. I was possessed during the next three days by a tireless need to work on this thing only. Sewing different-sized pillowcases like an automaton, I experimented with different weights and fills, dragging my screaming, uncooperative kids through blinding whiteout snowstorms to every fabric store within thirty miles, looking for the perfect fabric, the perfect print, the perfect welt cord. I used a hundred-dollar sewing machine I had gotten for free with my credit card points, jamming my fingers under the needle occasionally—I was a lousy sewer—and produced pretty pillowcases with tiny little bloodstains on them where I had sewn over my finger as I tried to turn a tight corner on the cheap, lumbering machine.

DO YOU HAVE A MILLION-DOLLAR PRODUCT?

To evaluate your product, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is there a need for my product?

• Does a market exist to buy it?

• How big is that market?

• Do I have the capacity to meet the need?

• Am I willing to learn how to knock down doors to take it to market?

The Next Big Thing: Evaluating Trends

and Countertrends

Some of the nation’s biggest retailers employ full-time trend spotters, who do nothing but look in their crystal balls of research, intuition, and popular culture to come up with the next big thing. This is actually more of a predictable science than you would think. Hallmark, with more than forty-two thousand stores nationally, employs a professional trend forecaster, Marita Wesely-Clough, whom the magazine American Demographics identified as one of the top five trend spotters in the nation, to keep its retailers ahead of the consumer curve. To read her current forecasts, type Hallmark trends into your Google Search bar. She predicts that the next five years will give birth to a new entrepreneurial age, in which young companies will produce ingenious products and devise new strategies to take their products direct to consumers as retailing giants experience temporary stasis from their mega-mergers, including Sears and Kmart, Federated (Macy’s) and May Company, Belk and Proffitt’s. So brush off your idea for the next big thing you’ve been sitting on for years and ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have a great idea? What is a good idea? Generally speaking, it’s anything that will wake you up in the middle of the night or keep you up. I experienced this same inexplicable passion about my quaint little invention soon after I made it, seeing opportunity that made me so excited I couldn’t sleep. Whether you’re investing your precious time or money in a product or a service, there are a few key elements to what defines a great idea.

• Have you identified an underserved niche? Every successful entrepreneur is always on the hunt for their next unexploited market. Once you find a customer base that has previously been ignored in the marketplace, it is easier to design your product’s features and benefits around it. One of the most successful examples of this in the last decade was Tommy Hilfiger’s almost accidental connection with the rap and hip-hop community. Until Tommy, almost nobody was making clothes for this image-conscious and sometimes affluent group of consumers, and they practically made his empire overnight. My product’s success identified a niche by merging home decorator accent with spa therapy; consumers could buy a microwaveable moist heat pillow that no longer looked like a medical device, a sock, or a doughnut. It would look great in their homes or as a gift. Other features that distinguished it from similar products in the marketplace included a superior heat source, removable washable pillowcase, no smelly herbs, and upscale designer fabrics. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Everyone is always looking for something hot and new, and so my product found its way into every retail environment there is!

I woke one morning to the tune of 2001: A Space Odyssey playing in my head. What had I made? Why was I so possessed? What would I call it?

After all, this was just corn in a bag. A very pretty bag, I would years later joke with my chief financial officer. After at least two dozen different prototypes, I had finally sewn the perfect pillow, with a finished size of ten by sixteen inches, complete with a removable, washable pillowcase, featuring a contrasting fabric-covered welt cord trim and an envelope-style closure on the back. Inside was a very nicely sewn pillow of cotton muslin filled with my ingenious thermodynamic heating element, feed corn. Later this internal heating element would be upgraded to expensive seed corn.

I recognized my dilemma instantly: How could I possibly express in a name the superiority and comfort of something so deceptively simple? How would I put into words the indescribable feeling of soothing relief that I felt when I held this heated bag against my chest, allowing its waves of healing warmth to pulse into my heart, making me distantly recall the embrace of my mother when I was a child? How could I communicate to tense, overtaxed modern consumers the release of a deep sigh that this product would deliver to their cold, weary bodies after heating it for only two to three minutes in the microwave? I stood in my kitchen, a Michigan snowstorm raging outside in the deep woods that surrounded our suburban development, as two troublemaking, mischievous toddlers ran around my house with abandon and glee, breaking, spilling, crying, and laughing like Thing One and Thing Two in Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat. Impervious to the chaos, I thought about the solace provided by my simple little product, which made me feel, for one peaceful moment, that all was right in the world.

Trademark 101: Crazy Is Good

How do you put that into words?! I want to say the name Wuvit instantly came to my mind, but that would just be subscribing to the myth of the Mommy Millionaire, which I am trying to dispel here. The real story is that I held it next to my chest and whispered in a childlike voice, I love it. Love It. Luvit. Hmmmmm. I raced down to the computer—first popping a videotape of Rugrats into the VCR and shoving a box of cereal at my still pajama-clad toddlers—went to the United States Patent and Trademark Office Web site, www.uspto.gov, and just started searching trademarks. Damn! Luvit was already taken by a brand of toilet paper. What a waste of a great name! Who luvs toilet paper? I had a job before I was a mommy, in marketing at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. I still possessed some creative brain cells that weren’t destroyed by two years of pregnancy and four years of an almost total and complete lack of sleep. I had to use them.

WHY YOU NEED A TRADEMARK

• A trademark provides legal protection in the marketplace for the name of your product or business name and is defined as any word, name, symbol, or device used to identify and distinguish a producer’s goods from others. A service mark provides legal protection for a service instead of a product.

• A trademark is a key piece of intellectual property (IP) that is critical to the future success of your product in the marketplace, as well as a valuable asset to your company.

• You need to protect your product’s name right at the beginning, before you introduce it to the marketplace, or you may risk losing the name later to someone who may contest your ownership rights because you didn’t register it.

• Another reason you need to register your trademark right at the beginning is to make sure that you’re not impinging on anyone else’s trademark rights, which you’ll discover with a search on the USPTO’s Web site, www.uspto.gov. You could be sued if you do so.

• It can take up to a year to have your trademark formally approved by the USPTO, at which time you will be legally allowed to use the registered trademark symbol ®. Until then, you need to use the symbol ™ behind your product’s name to let the public know that you’re claiming it as your mark.

What was the next best name after Luvit? Wuvit! Why, that was brilliant! I guessed that nobody could have possibly registered that as a trademark, and I was right. I only had to fill out a simple online form with line-by-line directions provided by the USPTO and charge $325 on my credit card and I could own this trademark in a year. As a former marketing professional, I knew that creating a unique, nonsensical brand name would get the instant attention of the consumer in a brand-crowded marketplace. Look at Kleenex. That was marketing genius. The latest to join the crazy name ranks is Google, after only seven years valued at over $100 billion. You know you’ve created gold when your brand becomes so distinct and unforgettable that it comes to represent the generic product itself and becomes part of the language, like Kleenex. What consumer would ever be able to walk by a product called Wuvit in the marketplace without at least stopping to find out what the heck it was?

THREE TYPES OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

1. Trademarks

2. Patents

3. Copyrights

All are registered and controlled by the USPTO (www.uspto.gov) or the U.S. Copyright Office (www.copyright.gov).

• To search for a trademark, start by logging on to www.uspto.gov and click on the Trademarks tab on the left navigation bar. Select Main tab. Read under Basics, you’ll find Where Do I Start? (www.uspto.gov/web/trademarks/workflow/start.htm).

• Beneath the Trademarks navigation link, click on Search Trademarks. You will be directed to Tess, the Trademark Electronic Search System. Click on New User Form Search and follow the specific directions.

HOW TO REGISTER A TRADEMARK

1. Take the TEAS (Trademark Electronic Application System) Tutorial, a free service of the USPTO, which explains step-by-step how to fill out your electronic trademark application online, (www.uspto.gov/teas/eTEAStutorial.htm).

2. Determine what mark you want to register.

3. Use Tess to search the USPTO database to determine whether a similar mark is already registered or whether an application for a similar mark has been filed for related goods and/or services.

4. If you didn’t find any similarly confusing marks in your search of Tess, check the Trademark Application and Registration Retrieval (TARR) system to see if there are any other potential conflicts.

5. If not, it’s time to file your application online, which will require you to submit a payment of $325 by credit card. This is a nonrefundable fee, so make sure you do your homework first. If they turn down your application because a similar mark already exists, you will not get your money back.

6. If your mark consists of any original artwork, you’ll need to convert it first to a jpeg file so that it can be electronically attached with your application.

7. Once you file your application, you’ll immediately receive e-mail acknowledgment of your filing. Save this, because it will have important information, including your filing date and case number. You’ll need to have this handy when an examining attorney calls from the USPTO to discuss your application.

What’s the Difference Between ™ and ® and How Do I Protect My Trademark?

Use ™ to identify your brand in the marketplace while awaiting the acceptance of your trademark application from the USPTO. This gives fair warning to all competitors that you are claiming this mark as a brand. You may only use ® when your request for a trademark has been formally granted and it is accepted as a registered trademark.

Scam Alert—Trademarks

Every time I file a trademark, I will get numerous letters in the mail looking very official with an invoice inclosed for anything from $200 to $2,000, offering to record my trademark application in their database. This is an unnecessary expense. They are counting on your inexperience to cause you to send them a check for a useless service. Some of these scammers will go to great lengths to make their correspondence look like it came from an official U.S. government source. Be careful and read the fine print.

Office Essentials

There are few tools more essential to running a successful business than a good phone system and an Internet cable modem. In addition to my cable modem, I have always had at least three phone lines operating out of my home office, one for business, one dedicated fax line, and one line that my customers can call toll-free. If you’re still using a dial-up modem, stop. Enter the twenty-first century and invest in a technology that will make your work infinitely easier and happier. Since cable modems provide Internet access over cable, they are much faster than modems that use typical phone lines. I still know many holdouts who refuse to spend the extra cash for a cable Internet connection, and I feel that their stubbornness on this small front will contribute to their ultimate failure as successful businesswomen. Believe me, there will be hundreds of phone conversations you’ll have with million-dollar clients while you seamlessly surf through Web sites tracking down critical, deal-closing information as you speak. If you have to wait for three minutes for Web pages to load through your dial-up connection or you miss an important call from a customer who has to listen to an annoying busy signal or voice mail while you comb the Web researching the names of buyers, you might as well not be in business.

HOW TO DOWNLOAD THE FREE GOOGLE