For the first YFE Book Club, we’ve chosen to jump off with The CRAVE Company founder, Melody Biringer’s book, Craving Success. The book is available via eBook and in paperback form.
Each week our discussion will be centered around 2 to 3 chapters of the book for four weeks beginning Monday, April 23rd and ending Monday, May 21st.
Why participate?
- Meet other women like yourself.
- Discuss what it means to build a business around Melody’s 10 lessons learned from over 20 businesses in 30 years.
- Learn from a seasoned “entrepreneuress” as you experience the same peer-to-peer mentorship that YFE is known to facilitate.
Join our YFE Book Club Facebook Group to Participate!
Find out more about the women that will be getting the conversation going on the blog and in our “Closed” Facebook Group. Meet theYFE Book Club Moderators…
With an extensive background in both dance and business administration along with a growing knowledge of design (both interior and otherwise) Jessica is in the founding stages of bringing J Newell Media, LLC a Boutique Online Media Firm to the light of day. Her first project is creating a new model for offering dance education to children via the web, set to launch in September 2012! In her spare time, she’s writes an auto-biographical account of her life as a native New Yorker in a post 9/11 world over on her blog, meetjessicanewell.info
YFE: How do you prefer to read books?
JN: When it comes to information heavy books I’m a kindle girl all the way! But I also love looking at things that tend to be more visually oriented and for that I tend to go old school. It all depends on what the book is about, I guess, so if its a workbook that has pictures – give me the paperback please :)
YFE: What beverage/snack usually accompanies your reading?
JN: There are two spots that you will usually find me reading a good book, my comfy couch or any nearby Starbucks. That said ut I’m not much of a coffee person so I like tea (Tall Soy Chai Latte – yum!) and a sweet treat like a mini cupcake or ice cream. As a night owl reading is one of my favorite things to do to calm my mind down before bed so a herbal tea is just lovely.
YFE: What was the most informative business book you have read to date? How about the most inspirational?
JN: Any “(Insert Skill Here) for Dummies” works for me when it comes to the nitty gritty of business or technology oriented books. I love how they break down heavy topics in a way that I can grasp when I need to quickly learn something I need to apply to my work. Its great to know what you are getting when you start reading a business related book and the Dummies series always delivers in my mind.
I also love anything by Stephen Covey since I’m a planning nut. His guidance on building trustworthiness being the key ingredient to any form of success is the one business principle that never changes. Ever.
Besides those I once went through a workbook called Creative Girl… While I didn’t actually build out the ideas I put in there going through and getting my creative juices flowing was one of the best things I could have done as a newbie entrepreneur to fire up my confidence.
YFE: When you are reading for business what magazines or books do you read just for fun?
JN: The other day I was looking at the books that me and my husband still have left (we’ve passed a number along once we got a kindle) and a lot of the of the ones that are mine are one’s like: “How to start your interior design firm/professional organizing business/e-commerce store…” I guess I have a bit of an obsession with learning the bits and bytes of starting and running creative oriented businesses. Right now I’m building up a new business model but I like learning the how to’s of things that are already established ways running things.
Anything that combines creativity and business is a must for my bookshelf and those are the one’s that I don’t read digitally – BUT I’ve cut down majorly on my magazine reading because it was starting to junk up our home. Instead I scour through my Facebook Page and Twitter account for articles from the people I like to follow most and save them to Instapaper. When I have a few minutes I read through some articles and then share them on social media. It’s been the best was to replace my magazine habit and I get to see a lot of articles you won’t find in print.
Raised in nightclubs, recording studios and TV stations, freelance graphic designer, Morgan Hatton, rebelled against her entertainment family traditions in her early twenties to work the 9-5 in the stringent corporate world of her hometown, Washington, D.C. Unable to deny all of the gumption planted early by her parents, she has little by little seemed to inevitably circle back to that 1099 world she grew up in. Starting first with an outsourced sales resource for small businesses in Los Angeles then developing a brand management consultancy for aspiring music artists in Atlanta to now running a boutique ‘au courant’ web and graphic design firm in Washington, D.C., Morgan has quite unexpectedly become known as a mild, yet successful, serial-entrepreneur. She now has a very happy professional home working for and with the singers, actors, agents, and stylists she once thought to get away from.
Morgan now resides just outside D.C. in Silver Spring, MD with her 7 year-old-son, Luke, who, of course, quite fittingly asked for headshots for his last birthday. Although most of her time is spent glued to her laptop, she also works on the board of her sister’s non-profit, Angel Eyes, which provides D.C.’s homeless with care packages. She hopes to launch two new projects this year including an online portal to facilitate socio-economic growth for freelancers in the fashion and entertainment industry and a non-profit to provide life planning, coaching and mentoring to middle school students.
To sum up Morgan, Gayle King (via Kanye West) put it best, “I’m on a pursuit of awesomeness. Excellence is the bare minimum.” Party on, Garth!
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