style="font-size:15px;"> “I was enjoying the gratification of working with this woman, creating order out of chaos. The gratification fed a need of mine, and it was good. I got the idea that I could make a business out of this. There was an exchange of money for service, and it was a service that others needed. So even though it was a financial stretch for me, I threw a $25 classified ad in the Scarsdale Inquirer and another in the Westchester Women’s News. My ads said something to the effect of create order out of chaos. It was down-and-dirty simplistic, and it didn’t take long for my phone to ring.”
However, it also wasn’t long before the phone was about to be cut off. “My husband and I had hit rock bottom in our relationship,” Paulette explains. “We didn’t have enough money to pay our bills. Everyone was at our door to collect. We had a backlog of six to seven months of bills. We had no money in reserve. Friends were sending us food. My family was incredulous. How could you allow yourself to get into such a mess?” Within a year the couple separated and divorced.
As requests for Paulette’s organizational skills started to build, she increased her hourly fee from $10 to $25, and that relieved some of her financial strain. “I was bright enough to target my advertising to affluent communities,” she explains. “Some folks hired me to come into their homes once or twice a month to write checks for them. Others hired me for a day or two a week. I was soon making about $1,800 a month, and the money was like manna from heaven.”
For the next eight years, Paulette organized homes and offices. In 1986 she incorporated her business under the name Organizing Solutions. Eventually she purposely priced herself out of the residential market and focused on the commercial market where she could earn up to $125 an hour. Later, a major New York City–based bank hired her to conduct a workshop entitled Managing Multiple Priorities. At the height of her business, she was earning $100,000 a year!
But by the early 1990s, the economy shifted and suddenly the workshop business went soft and managing priorities was no longer such a big issue. Companies decided against sending their employees to workshops that cost money. “I was down and out,” says Paulette, “and my bills were beginning to backlog again. The cash wasn’t flowing and I still hadn’t learned how to save or invest money. I had no cushion for myself—saving money is a missing cell in my brain! I needed to do something fast.”
That’s when she remembered a booklet that she had received several months earlier. She had placed it in a desk drawer thinking she might return to it someday. It was a book of tips about how to make business presentations, and when Paulette read it she thought, “I could do better.” Now was the time to do it.
She spent several days writing 110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business, a booklet that, once printed and bound, could be mailed in a business-size envelope. All of the information in the booklet was based on material that Paulette taught in her seminars and used in her consulting sessions. Once she finished typing the manuscript, she located a printer, agreed to pay him $300 over a period of ninety days, and he produced a supply of the booklets. Meanwhile, with no advertising money to promote her product, Paulette sent excerpts from her booklet to magazines, newsletters, and newspapers, and invited the editors to publish her material in exchange for mentioning how readers could purchase a copy of the booklet. During the next six months, she sold 15,000 booklets at $3 each! Later she increased the per booklet price to $5. Five thousand sales came from one source, a newsletter called Bottom Line Personal. “They ran only nine lines of text about my booklet,” says Paulette, “and when I went to the post-office I found a pink slip that said: See Clerk. They could not fit all of the envelopes in my mailbox!”
Since producing her booklet in 1991, Paulette has sold more than half a million copies in three languages without spending a penny on advertising. She also has licensed several companies to reproduce her booklet for their own promotions. Lillian Vernon offered the booklet free to customers who purchased from the company’s catalogue. After Paulette established a Web site and began communicating in cyberspace, she sold 105,000 copies of her booklet to a firm in Milan, Italy. “To this day we’ve never spoken,” she explains. “We’ve done all of our business by electronic mail.”
In addition to booklet sales, Paulette now generates revenue by teaching others how to write, produce, market, and sell booklets. She has created a videotape and workbook package that she sells via her Web page, www.tipsbooklets.com. She teaches many seminars by telephone, consults privately with clients, and also teaches public seminars.
“Along the way,” Paulette says, “I’m learning how to make money. When I started my business, I had to dig out of a hole. I was making decent bucks, but I had to work my way up to zero. I don’t think that’s an unusual situation. But as I started to own my intelligence, I got smarter. For example, I said why sell booklets for $3 when it’s a lot easier to pull a $5 out of a wallet? When I realized that I’m an intelligent person and I was just missing some information, and all I had to do was get it, business became easier. In the meantime, I’ve got plenty of enthusiasm and the ability to talk endlessly.”
And with those qualities, who needs much money to start a business?
Michael and Jamie Ford of Los Lunas, New Mexico, near Albuquerque, have yet another story to tell about the virtues of starting small. They were once a middle-class family living in Oklahoma with their three young children. They decided to move to New Mexico in 1991 to be near Michael’s grandmother, who was ill. Little did they know that the move would nearly destroy them financially. In a short period of time, they went from middle-class to living off public assistance. It wasn’t until they managed to borrow some money to start a business that they got back on their feet again.
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