Excelle

The best excuse for a dead career is your kids, right? Most people give you a pass when you point to the trials and tribulations of motherhood as the reason you didn’t make it as a banker, artist, or entrepreneur. It’s a cop out, and often a fallback for women who weren’t really happy with their career paths. Well, the thousands ...

I love reading Sara Pennypacker’s “Clementine” books to my girls because I laugh out loud at the antics and musings of this spunky third grader. But while Clementine is amusing, I wasn’t expecting her perspective in “The Talented Clementine” to resonate with me. I mean, come on, it’s been 30 years since I’ve been a third grader! But in this book, ...

This post is for those of you who are serious about overcoming obstacles and serious about taking your business to the next level. You will never go for your dreams — business or personal — as long as you have more pain associated to achieving them than you do to not achieving them. So the bad news is that it’s time ...

I came across a Wall Street Journal article recently called “More New Mothers Are Staying Home Even When It Causes Financial Pain.” Author Sue Shellenbarger wrote a fantastic piece on how moms are choosing to stay at home—at great financial costs to families—in order to stay with their young babies during the first few years of their lives. Lots o’ great ...

An issue that seems to resurface frequently among freelancers, consultants, and the self-employed is the whole “getting paid what you’re worth” question. A journalist actually called me up the other day and asked my opinion on it as well. She was seeing a trend of moms being exploited for work at below-standard rates, and I told her that it isn’t just ...

Many mothers straddle the line between working full-time and staying home with their kids. Working part-time can be a great way for women to stay connected to both their careers and families. But moms who have staked out this middle ground attest to the tradeoffs required to do it successfully. Think you could find your comfort zone in a part-time job? ...

Women are starting businesses at a rate three times that of men, but there are still inroads to be made in typically male-dominated fields such as publishing, biotechnology and gaming, to name a few. h4. *Biotechnology* Mireille Gingras is founder, CEO and president of HUYA Bioscience International, a company that focuses on drug development. She offers the following five tips for ...

I have written about the importance of going outside of your comfort zone as an entrepreneur as long as my blog has been around. I could wax poetic about how or why we need to get uncomfortable for an entire post, but this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sums it up so much more eloquently: "Man's mind, once stretched by ...

While we work hard to put legitimate information out there for our readers about the realities of starting and running a business from home, sadly, hundreds of thousands of people still fall for scams every year. More disturbingly, of the top ten internet scams listed by the FTC, half of them are targeted to individuals who want to work at home. ...

I get at least one email a week asking if I would consider becoming a mentor. As a full time internet marketing mom, I’m doing what thousands of others wish to do so the requests aren’t surprising — it’s just not easy to know how to respond. I don’t like saying no to a genuine request, but mentoring is time consuming. ...

Business owner Gene Marks offers three reasons why smart entrepreneurs will emerge from the downturn stronger than before There are about 20 million small businesses right now in this country, depending on who you ask. I'm going to bet that a great majority will survive the Great Recession of 2008-2009. I'm hoping my business will be one of them. And I'm ...

So while I am conquering my anxieties with positive action steps in my job hunt, I've received some rather amusing bits of advice. I've managed to always graciously smile and say thank you outwardly, while inwardly wondering what is occurring in people's minds as they share these bits of advice. #1: Take the Summer Off So my top piece of bad ...

I own a business. Over the years, I have owned several businesses. To me, they were all successful, depending on your definition of success. I like to think of each attempt as a stepping-stone to finding my true purpose. I am entrepreneurial by nature and always yearned to be in control of my destiny. I have probably earned a few million ...

With over 300,000 “Internet Home Business” related searches on the internet every month, it’s safe to say that there is a lot of demand for information on how to make money on the internet. Sadly, this also means that there are a lot of shady characters preying on this group of people. I knew someone who fell for one of these ...

Lately I’ve been getting lots of emails from women who left their careers behind to raise their kids and are now having second thoughts about the decisions they made. The main driver of their doubt seems to the bad economy. Many women are desperate for work now because their husbands have either lost their jobs or had their incomes cut during ...

The background: I have five kids, three of them by marriage, two of them by birth. They range in age from 14-years old to 16-months old, and when we travel, we haul around a lot of stuff. I started keeping an eye out for gear and gadgets that would make our lives easier - and by "make our lives easier" I ...

Prospective clients often ask this question: "I have an idea and I want to start a business, but where do I go from here?" Depending on their background, their proposed industry and what they have accomplished at the time the question is asked, my answer varies. However, one component of my answer never changes: I always advise clients to do some ...

I think we can all agree that even though we work at home, we can still have "bad days at the office." Some days we just get discouraged. Others we wonder what the heck we are doing. And on the really bad days, we question whether we are really doing the right thing and how we will ever turn it around. ...

Let me start by saying that I'm not an extrovert. Every personality assessment I've ever taken spits out results that say I'm "in my head" or a "thinker." In other words, an introvert. And I've built my career on networking. It's opened doors for me, given me critical advice and, when I became an entrepreneur, developed millions of dollars in business ...

As Executive Managing Director of two Northern California chapters of eWomenNetwork, and sponsor for three other chapters within the organization, I meet these two types of people all the time. And I see a distinct difference in the progress of their careers because of their approaches. Whether online or in-person, there are key characteristics that clearly differentiate net-workers from net-beggars. You’re ...