Well, I am really excited to be able to present to you my first
interview: Barbara
Winter, best-selling author
and creative entrepreneur extraordinaire. I am always fascinated
by people who manage to combine their artistic and creative
talents with being a successful entrepreneur. In the end that's
what I am aspiring to achieve.
I first met Barbara in a seminar in Toronto and I enjoyed her
humorous, casual yet informative style. A few phone conversations
and a tele-class later: here she is!
Barbara in front of Buckingham Palace.
1. Please tell us a bit about your background and work
experience.
I've been self-employed for 30 years so the things I did prior
to that seem very much in the distant past. My first job was
as a high school English and speech teacher. Then I worked for
the State of Minnesota Employment service. After taking three
years off to be a fulltime mother, I was an interior designer
with Ethan Allen. Every one of those jobs taught me things that
helped me when I started my own business--including teaching
me that I never wanted to work for anyone but myself.
2. You are one of the pioneers of self-employment. When
and why did you decide to become self-employed? What was it
like when you got started? How have things changed since then?
I certainly wasn't encouraged to be self-employed when I was
growing up. The decision evolved gradually. I had gotten interested
in personal growth and development back in the early seventies
and was slightly frustrated that all the books and seminars
(which were far fewer than there are today) were by men, for
men. I decided to take some of the things I'd learned and do
seminars for women. I also began publishing a newsletter called
The Successful Woman. It was all trial and error.
There was very little information to help me then. I began working
from home, but was somewhat embarrassed about that. I had no
idea that I was going to be part of the home business revolution.
Essentially, it's so much easier now to be self-employed because
there are more of us doing it and there's more good information.
3. One of the primary focuses of this website
is travel. Tell us about your "Support Your Wanderlust" seminars.
Well, I've always had wanderlust myself and as I got more confident
about being self-employed I knew I wanted my business to include
travel. As time went on, students in Making
a Living Without a Job seminars kept telling me that
they wanted to travel so How To Support Your Wanderlust
came out of those requests--and my own and other entrepreneur's
experiences creating profitable travel for themselves.
4. How do you integrate travel into your entrepreneurial
ventures? What opportunities of travel have you been able to
enjoy through your business endeavours?
I travel extensively throughout the US doing seminars. Now that
I've joined forces with Nick Williams, who lives in London,
we're doing more work together in the UK, as well as in the
US. As a writer, I've also traveled and incorporated research
into those trips adding another profit center-- and tax deductible
travel.
5. How often do you travel and how do you reconcile
travel with all your various business endeavours?
It varies, but I've kind of developed a system that works for
me. The seminars I do in adult ed programs are primarily held
on Friday evenings and Saturdays so I travel on the weekends
with those. When I'm in Europe, I have to have my writing projects
done before I leave. I've always preferred to travel more frequently,
but for shorter periods of time so that makes it possible to
keep up with the demands of my business at home because I'm
usually not away for long, long periods of time. And I only
buy houseplants that can survive without me.
6. Please tell us about your life and business philosophy
in general.
My philosophy--in its simplest form--is "have a great life and
talk about it." I decided long ago to make myself a guinea pig
and experiment with ideas before passing them along in my writing
and teaching. I consider myself a card-carrying dream builder
and my greatest joy is helping others go for their own dreams.
7. You are a bestselling author of the book "Making
a Living Without a Job". Tell us more about that book.
Making a Living Wihtout a Job was first a seminar which
was enormously popular--still is--that put together my ideas
about being creatively self-employed. When it went into book
form, I wanted to write a manual that wasn't just about getting
started, but also about keeping going. It really was meant to
free the corporate slaves by exposing them to a different way
of working and thinking about their own lives.
8. What about your most recent book "Jump Start Your
Entrepreneurial Spirit"?
Jumpstart Your Entrepreneurial Spirit is a collection
of 52 short essays about all sorts of things appropriate to
the entrepreneurial life. It includes lots of the intangibles
things that make for success and lots of stories about people
that inspire me.
9. Please tell us about your " Winning Ways" newsletter
and the tele-classes and seminars you offer?
One of the most critical things for anyone wanting to succeed
at self-employment is to have steady reinforcement. A newsletter
does that beautifully and also gives me a format to share new
business ideas, books, and stories from my seminar students.
Winning Ways comes out six times a year and is great
fun to write. I'll be starting my 19th year of publication,
which is a longevity record for small business newsletters.
While I still do short seminars that include the ones you've
mentioned and another called Establish Yourself as an Expert,
this past year I've been moving to longer events, which I love.
Here in Minnesota I do one called Camp Entrepreneur.
Nick and I also do an event in Las Vegas called Being an
Inspired Entrepreneur and another in the Lake District
in the UK called Building the Possible Dream. I'm quite
smitten with all the longer events and plan to do more of them
in the future.
10. For a while now you have been involved in building
a business across international frontiers. Please tell us more
about your newest initiative - Dreambuilders.
One of the interesting challenges I've been dealing with for
the past couple of years is learning how to work with a business
partner who lives 4,000 miles away. While e-mail and the telephone
make it easy to stay in touch, Nick Williams and I are also
aware of the fact that we're most creative when we're together
in the same place. Sometimes we also have little cultural differences
of opinion which we always manage to work out, perhaps because
we both find it fascinating to see a different perspective.
These are all just little issues that add spice to our business,
I'd say.
I once wrote an article called Another Barrier Down in
which I talked about the fact that we are the first people in
the history of the world for whom geography is not an obstacle
for starting a business. In the article I said the business
of the future will look quite different: our customers and clients
will be people who share a consciousness, not a postal code.
It's that new paradigm that Nick and I have heartily embraced
in creating the Dreambuilders Community. We're getting
members from all over the globe who share our consciousness.
It won't be long before we're holding events in a number of
different countries and seeing that the entrepreneurial spirit
can flourish almost anywhere. It's wildly exciting to be part
of this growing global community of inspired entrepreneurs.
Let me thank you, Barbara, for sharing your experiences and
some insight into your creative entrepreneurial mind. So far
I have learned a lot and I am definitely planning to sign up
for your next "Establish Yourself as an Expert" teleclass!
Barbara's book:
Related articles:
Check out my article preview for background
info on Barbara Winter
Read how Barbara got my creative
juices flowing
