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Inside the Minds:
Leading Women
What it Takes for Women to Succeed and Have it All in the 21st Century

Purchase this book on Amazon.com

 

Tiffany Bass Bukow
Netpreneur

 

How did you become a Dotcom CEO?

It took fifteen years, a lot of tenacity, flexibility, optimism and vision. I would have to say though that my job experiences over those years aligned quite nicely to prepare me to take advantage of many opportunities, which ultimately led to my dream job as a CEO.

I have had many people in my life say that I have been lucky and sometimes I certainly feel that way. However, I have spent a lifetime preparing myself to take advantage of this luck!

“Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity” – Oprah Winfrey

It all started in 1983 in High school in Chicago where I took my first computer-programming course, and I fell in love with the technology. Before computers, I had always been interested in the mechanics behind tape recorders and televisions and wanted to know how they worked. I used to fantasize when I was five years old about watching a television that would be just a little bigger than the size of a watch. Ten years later that technology became a reality.

At age 16, I was introduced to this complex piece of machinery called a computer and it gave me a whole new sense of awe. I could not have imagined at the time how this magic box with its lines of code and punch cards would change the way the world did business when I grew up. I did however have the vision at that early age that it was something I should learn more about.

When I attended college, I enrolled as a computer engineer. I soon realized that my interests were more focused on the business aspects of computer applications instead of building the underlying technology. I changed my direction and studied Management Information Systems and Marketing.

My favorite class was a Management and Business Analysis class that used Harvard Business School Case Studies as the foundation of teaching. We broke out into work teams and analyzed the data for days until the professor would randomly choose one student to present to the class. Our task was to act as the CEO of the company we were analyzing and to set forth the strategic plan of action the company should take to be successful. We would pretend that we were talking to our Board of Directors (something I would learn a lot about much later). The professor, after our speech, would let us know what the best course of action really was and what the company actually did in real life. I received one of the highest grades in the class and learned that I was a good strategic thinker and not afraid to share my views in public. It was then I started to realize that I wanted to be a CEO of my own company some day.

I was 20 years old and had no idea how I would do this, after all I didn’t know any CEO’s or even any high level executives. I came from a working class town and was pretty naive about the ways of the corporate world. (The mistakes I made my first year in the corporate world were pretty humorous – but that is whole another story). I did keep the goal of becoming a CEO in the back of my mind for the next ten years until it became a reality.

After college I had wanted to go work for a big consulting firm (which is what a lot my friends and MIS majors did). Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately looking back now) it did not work out. So instead, I landed a job in Marketing where I worked for a few years supporting worldwide brands. One of the first people I befriended, at the new multi-billion dollar company I worked, was the CEO. My bosses and cohorts thought I was nuts to be socializing with the head guy, but I didn’t know any better. He was just another person to me (it was that naivete’ I was talking about before.) Looking back now it seemed like I had planned it, even though I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. The knowledge and experience I picked up in the Marketing world would be critical in the B2C (business to consumer) branding phase I was to enter ten years later with my own company.

At 23 years old, after working as a Marketing Assistant for two years, I decided I was working much too hard and making way too little money. So after observing numerous Sales Representatives driving around in their expensive sports cars and designer suits, I decided there has got to be a better way for me to develop my career. So I joined their ranks and spent some time working as a Sales Representative for a Fortune 500 technology company.

My life changed overnight.

I became the number one Sales Rep in my district and closed two of the biggest deals the sales branch had ever seen. I was now working half the hours I used to at my old job and was making twice the amount of money. Life was good! The formal training I received in sales would be invaluable as I took on the role of business development for my own company many years later.

After another two years, I decided it was time to look for new challenges, so I headed back to graduate school to refresh my computer skills and to study multimedia and instructional design. After all, computers were my first love. I didn’t know in 1993, when I enrolled, that the Internet I would use for research for my Master Degree would become the foundation of the New Economy.

Before I grappled with the New Economy, I wanted to learn something about the Global Economy. I took the summer off between Grad school years and backpacked alone through Europe. This was quite an accomplishment for me to travel by myself. I had never been outside the country, nor had I ever traveled alone. I conquered the fear of the unknown and bought a roundtrip ticket to Paris.

When you travel by yourself you get a lot more done, so I managed to see twenty cities and ten countries in just two months. I used the solitary time for introspection and to seek a fuller understanding of the world. It was a real eye-opening experience and I was exposed to situations and cultures that are indelibly marked in my memory. I couldn’t have known at the time that just four years later I would take a full year off on my honeymoon and see ten times as much of the world and even speak at the first Internet World conference in India. I also didn’t know that in 6 years I would begin my quest to create a global financial literacy program to help eliminate the poverty I had seen on my travels by teaching the world the fundamentals of saving for future goals.

My timing for Grad school was perfect and I was uniquely prepared to capitalize on the Multimedia Revolution. During my last semester in 1995 I participated as an intern at a Multimedia startup that made CD-ROM games. I was surprised at the chaotic nature of the environment. It was thirty people in one big dusty warehouse south of market in San Francisco with no walls and no rules. Quite a change from the structured corporate environments I came from where I was required to wear skirts and high heels and our manner of conduct was dictated. This multimedia startup managed to raise a few million dollars and began to put their plans in motion. I didn’t know at that time I would also have my own few million dollars and twenty people in a warehouse south of market in San Francisco just four years later.

Shortly after the internship ended, and sadly unable to find a job in CD-ROM production, I decided to volunteer my time to help my school develop the first online multimedia educational course. We used Netscape 1.0 as our development browser. This was before Microsoft even thought the Internet was a viable business opportunity. How could I have known that in just five years later that my own company would win a multimillion-dollar contract to create online educational programs for one of the biggest banks in the world and we would be responsible for teaching millions of Americans about personal finance?

After I finished the development of this first Internet course, I decided it was time to bring in some income. I was introduced to a partner who had an idea to create a financial services site that focused on education instead of just financial products. This was quite novel at the time since no one was doing this. Most websites were brochureware and had little educational quality or even interactivity.

I was excited to be doing something that would have social impact and still be a very lucrative and profitable business. A gal still has to make a living (after all I didn’t inherit any wealth), so even though I was a philanthropist at heart, I had my eye on business and making money. At my new startup, I spent my time hiring a production team, creating prototypes, writing a business plan and speaking to many advisers. But alas, it was early 1996 and the Dotcom craze had not quite taken off yet and I started to realize it wasn’t that easy to raise money, especially as a female 28 year old asking for five million dollars from strangers. After six months working for a paltry pay, funded by my partner, and an enormous number of eventually worthless stock options, I was forced to make a change.

I decided to head out on my own path and see what fate brought in. It was probably the worst time in my life to do this since I had just separated from a long-term relationship and had no where to live, had no money, my car had just gotten stolen and I had two ruptured disks in my neck. But I guess I really didn’t have a choice. The job offers weren’t flowing in and I needed to do something.

What I did do, even though I just left the financial services startup, was not completely abandon the idea of a financial services site. Fundamentally I knew that the Internet would be a terrific place to offer financial education online and the public would begin demanding it. But instead of trying to compete with huge players like Quicken who might decide to enter the general market, I decided to find my own little niche.

That niche was women. I acquired the domain name MsMoney.com and began planning a company that focused on educating women how to take financial control of their lives. I was a woman who had overcome great odds to get where I was today and the reason I was surviving in the midst of turmoil and still fearless, was because I had taken financial control of my life. I wanted to share my knowledge with the rest of the world and let them know anyone could do it because it wasn’t that hard once you knew how.

Unfortunately it was 1996 and only 18% of the Internet consisted of women. So it was not quite the time to start this new venture. So instead of embarking on the MsMoney.com plan, I had to create a Plan B. I spent time evaluating my skills and my resources and decided that opening my own Internet Consulting practice would be a good idea. I had a barbecue and invited all my friends over to announce to them that I was officially opening my office doors (which led to my dining room) as an Internet Consultant. My company name would be Tiff.Com and I would later become more affectionately known by my friends as Tiff Dot Com instead of Tiffany Bass.

The business started slowly and it was scary at first since I didn’t really have any capital to start the business. Not only that, I had quite a few student loans and no income coming in. But I decided that going out on my own was worth the risk. I laid out all my credit cards on the table and added up my credit amount. I decided I would give the new business a year using my 10 credit cards as capital. It was pretty easy to get the high interest rate pre-approved credit cards in the mail, but very hard to get a real business loan from the bank.

The great thing was, I didn’t even need to use this credit line. I was instantly profitable with my first account. Ok – so it wasn’t very hard to be profitable, since all I had was an old used Mac, a printer, a scanner, a phone and a dining room for an office. Oh yeah – and I can’t forget an ISDN line (I was one of the first in the world to use the technology). I was happy and my newly hatched plan was working. Whew!

In just two short years I went from a one person Internet Consulting and Web Design Shop to a twenty person company with Fortune 100 clients such as Sun, AOL, Bechtel, and Lucent. I was helping these Industry Leaders design and launch their websites. I felt pretty cool!

I started getting job offers from larger design firms who wanted me to come in and run their Internet consulting divisions. These are the same type of companies who turned me down in college. I figured, why would I want to go work for them now? Once you create your own culture and rules it is incredibly hard to go back to someone Else’s and survive let alone thrive.

In 1999, I attended the Internet World in LA and was pleased by what was happening in the Financial Services world on the Internet. People were really starting to use the Internet to educate themselves about money and they were even buying financial products online. I had been correct in predicting this trend. I had also been right that women would start flocking to the Net in droves. In 1999 women made up 50% of the online traffic. I was ready for my new plan.

This was the information that propelled me to officially start dedicating my energy to building the MsMoney.com website. It was the peak of the Dotcom era and I wasn’t going to miss out by building everyone else’s dream by being a consultant. I wanted to create something of my own. I wanted to impact the world and create social change by helping women become financially empowered.

I was in a unique position to start MsMoney because of the Tiff.com business. The core Tiff.Com team built the original prototype of MsMoney.com. I used the prototype to secure partnerships and generate interest amongst investors. Once I raised money, I converted t the Tiff.Com team to MsMoney employees and handed out those coveted stock options.

My life was about to enter a whirlwind. No – let me rephrase that – it was about to enter a hurricane! My new motto became, “What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger!” I faced every conceivable challenge you could imagine as a new CEO. We had technology problems, office space problems, phone problems, employee problems that led to firings and lawsuit threats. We had to get out of bad contracts, cope with losing key personnel, compete with 6 new competitors, overcome the fallout of the market, deal with investors who turned us down, realize our business plan was not viable, and eventually change our strategy. We had to hire new teams for the new vision, secure clients who could pay the bills, try to reduce our bills, get buy in from new employees, and the list goes on. It has been by far the most grueling year of my life. But because of that, it has also been the most rewarding.

As I write this, the race still isn’t over. In a way it is just the beginning. MsMoney has survived the first year of business and I have proven a new profitable business model. Our team members are starting to bond together and work more efficiently. Gone are the “survivor” days where I threw twenty strangers in one big room and asked them to overcome all their personal differences and idiosyncrasies so that they could work together for a common goal. We threw off the Island those folks who couldn’t cope and others left on their own because the startup environment was too harsh. (Guess they didn’t like the bugs we served for lunch!) When you have no rules, some people just can’t cope. But now, we are finally coming into our own. And it isn’t because of this fledgling CEO, it is because we have finally built a team of 20 people who are ready to fight to win in this New Economy. They believe in our new mission and are ready to risk it all for their piece of the American Pie and their ability to make a difference in the world.

Describe an obstacle you have overcome on the way to making your business a success?

In Fall of 1999 MsMoney was riding high on the success of Dotcom Mania. It seemed as if there wasn’t anything MsMoney couldn’t conquer. I had received a commitment of three million dollars in financing in December of 1999, which gave my company a twenty million dollar valuation. We began to ramp up production immediately and run down the IPO path. I was fairly confident that I could raise another twenty million in the summer for a marketing campaign to let the world know that we were here to help secure women’s financial future. It wouldn’t be long before we went public and raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

MsMoney grew from a handful of people to fifteen full time employees in just a few months. And on March 29, 2000 we launched the MsMoney.com website with the participation of the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her presence made a world of difference. Yahoo’s television cameras were at our offices memorializing our launch event and an entrepreneur roundtable with the First Lady. It was all being broadcasted via satellite across the entire country. We celebrated at our launch party with six hundred people in the Grand Ballroom at the swanky Hotel W in downtown San Francisco.

In just thirty days, we went from a virtually unknown company to a household name. USA Today and Yahoo! named us the Hot Site of the Week. We had over 40 positive press mentions in the following months, including The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, ABC News, PBS, Forbes, Business 2.0, Time, Working Woman and The Industry Standard.

It all appeared to be a rosy picture and our future seemed secure. The market was HOT! We had six competitors appear shortly after us. Everyone wanted to be in the financial services business targeting women.

But then in April the Stock Market crashed…

And my life dramatically changed again!

It seemed as if Dotcom’s had fallen out of favor overnight. The dreams of thousands of entrepreneurs went up in smoke and hundreds of millions of investor’s dollars went down the drain.

It didn’t help soothe my thoughts that I wasn’t the only one who spent millions of dollars chasing an unrealistic dream that the world would stop everything they were doing and use the Internet for everything in their lives.

I had to ask myself – Why had I fallen prey to the frenzy of the Internet? Why had I put solid business acumen on the backburner in favor of the latest trend? It wasn’t as if I was new to the online world. MsMoney was my third Internet company since 1995. I had run a profitable and successful Dotcom before (Tiff.com). I even held the MsMoney.com name for three years before I created a business around it so that I could wait for the right timing.

But the timing wasn’t right, not just for me, but for the thousands of other Dotcom’s who thought they were going to change the world overnight.

Now I was faced with a real challenge: MsMoney had spent over two million dollars in six months and was in need of an additional cash infusion. The three million dollar commitment I received the previous December only materialized into two million dollar after the market crash. I couldn’t in good conscious take another million from investors when I knew that it was unlikely MsMoney could be a profitable business any time soon.

So what was I to do? We were out of money. The disappointment I felt was enormous. Twenty people relied on me for their livelihood and investors had given me millions of dollars in the hopes of a profitable outcome.

I had no choice but to pick up the pieces of dashed hopes and broken dreams and start treading down a new path. I would not accept failure as part of my resume. I put on the happiest face I could muster and summoned my optimistic old self who had been buried in the rubble of the Internet fall-out and began to inspire the MsMoney troops.

Not everyone could understand my new found cheerfulness. Some of the MsMoney team couldn’t overcome the uncertainty and the fear of failing and left for safer and more stable ground immediately.

I too wanted to be on safer ground and quickly devised a plan to get us there. I had run a profitable Internet company before and new I could do it again. In this case, I had to do it again very quickly or MsMoney would go bankrupt.

In just sixty days I re-positioned MsMoney from a financial services website designed to help women secure their financial future to a financial services Internet Consulting company which helped Financial Institutions build their websites and reach targeted consumers. In that short time, I convinced the one of the industry leaders in online banking, to let MsMoney help them redesign their website and develop customized content for their consumers.

Overnight, we became profitable and it looked like MsMoney was going to survive.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Not everyone in the company wanted MsMoney JUST to survive. Some folks came on board wanting MsMoney to IPO – to go public – so that they could cash in their dreams and retire millionaires in just a couple years. When the cash dream faded, their enthusiasm for MsMoney faded. They didn’t want to just work at a company that was only profitable, they wanted to HIT IT BIG! So ultimately I ended up losing some of the higher level executives because there wasn’t enough financial reward to attract them to stay.

In the end though, I feel that MsMoney is a better company because of the turmoil that we went through. The core team that stayed through the difficulties feels very bonded to each other and committed to MsMoney’s long term goals of changing the way consumer learn about managing their money and securing their financial future. They are very passionate about their work and truly believe that they can make a difference in the world. Though they may not retire millionaires next year, they feel that the work they are doing is far more rewarding. This is the type of people I want supporting the MsMoney mission.

The original mission of MsMoney was to reach millions of people through our MsMoney.com site in the first 18 months of business and help these consumers secure their financial futures. Though we may not be doing that through our own website, we are certainly accomplishing the same goal through our client’s financial services websites. And hopefully we will help create a financially smarter nation of investors!

What advice would you give a start-up?

Startups are faced with challenges that most established companies are not. There is a whole another set of rules for this industry. We all know the statistics about start-ups – that nine of ten fail in their first year. We have seen that even more predominantly in the press lately with the fallout of Dotcom Mania. It appears the press is more interested in reported failures now than successes. The tide has certainly turned from a year ago when anything that the touched the Internet turned to gold. Now those Internet dreams have tarnished and all that is left is a stigma that may deter people and turn good ideas away. One hundred and fifty well known Dotcom companies have failed in the second half of this year alone.

So how does an entrepreneur overcome the fear associated with those odds and trek on in the midst of widespread pessimism?

Well I think the best advice I can give to an entrepreneur is to fully test the business model before throwing millions of dollars at it. The problem with many of the failed Dotcom companies can be analyzed by looking at a company like Pets.com. The problem with Pets.com was that people fell in love with the sock puppet and forget to look at the hand behind it or the bottom line. It appeared to me that it was going to be difficult for this type of business to make money, especially with so many competitors. I wondered why their investors bought into their profitability analysis. I still don’t know how they expected to be profitable when they sold their products below market rate and offered free shipping.

That company was funded on a promise that the world would come rushing to buy pet products online just because it existed. The belief that if you build it – they will come has been the major fall of most failed Dotcoms. One other failed belief that Pets.com had is – If you build it and spend bazillions of dollars on television commercials and billboards consumers will flock to your site. I went to the site once and bought some dog vitamins and that cute sock puppet. And that was all I visited – only once – at I loved that sock puppet! (Cause Pets Don’t Drive! J) People are busy and it is incredibly hard to get them to change their patterns. Old habits die hard and people did not rush to the Internet to buy things as companies and investors had planned.

I mention Pets.com but my own company had similar problems. I used Pets.com as an example because they are widely known (because of all those millions spend on television commercials). We faced challenges that were very similar. I brought in the Ivy League MBA’s to do the business modeling analysis and they showed me that MsMoney would be a hugely profitable business. Well they told me what I wanted to hear and it just so happened that they believed it also. Unfortunately, it turned out to be overly optimistic analysis and therefore bad advice. The MsMoney.com business model was flawed from the very beginning and I should have opened my eyes and seen the real truth! But alas, I did not, so I spent millions of dollars believing in my dream, to only have it shattered nine months later when the revenues we predicted never showed up.

I was fortunate to be a creative and flexible so I was able to make some major changes to shift the business model in order to survive. But it wasn’t easy. Luckily my tenacious personality wouldn’t allow me to quit.

The advice I have for a new company is to start small because this will give you the opportunity to explore the market and turn consumer behavior theory into reality. Consumer behavior is hard to predict, so unless you have some solid measures of past performance it will be difficult to project future activity.

If you are not a consumer company and instead sell your products to businesses, then talk directly to the type of businesses you would be selling your product to. Get some verbal commitments that they would buy your product or service before you actually spend the money to build it.

This might seem like common sense, but you would be amazed how common sense was thrown out the window during the Dotcom heydays.

Above all, stay flexible. The New Economy is incredibly dynamic and requires leaders who can adapt quickly to changes. Most Venture Capitalists I have spoken to say that it is very common to start a company with a particular plan in mind only to shift the focus within the first year once more data starts filtering in. So be open to change and new opportunities and capitalize on what is working and don’t dwell on what is not.

What personality traits and skills have you been known for over the course of your career?

The personality traits I have been known for are my optimism and tenacity. Regardless of the situations I have been faced with, I have been able to see the bright side and strategically plow ahead no matter what the circumstances were.

This is a quote I often think of when my hope falters.

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”
–Dale Carnegie

Think of people like Benjamin Franklin, Christopher Columbus, Madam Curie and Helen Keller. The reason these people are remembered in history is because they have overcome obstacles and challenges and their courage has changed the world. What these people have in common is that they never gave up until they found the answer or solved their problem.

“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”
— Helen Keller

Benjamin Franklin used to say when he was experimenting with electricity: “I haven’t failed 1000 times, I have found 1000 ways that don’t work, which has put me even closer to a solution.”

Experience has taught me the difference between tenacity and stubbornness.

I probably should not have been so stubborn believing that the first business model of MsMoney was viable. If I would have given up earlier on Plan A, I could have started on Plan B much sooner. It was Plan B after all that was the profitable plan. If I had converted to Plan B sooner, I would have avoided the frightening walk near bankruptcy. Of course, I was being tenacious when I forged ahead to create a Plan B and follow through with it even though success looked dubious from the start.

“Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.”
— Ann Landers

I would have to say that my best skills are people skills. These are often difficult to describe because they are so complex. I take time to understand the psychology and motivation behind the people that I deal with, whether it is a team member of MsMoney or a business partner. If you don’t understand the fundamentals of someone’s personality than it is difficult to inspire or motivate that individual to seek their own success or success on your behalf. I try to treat each person as an individual and work to customize a management or business development approach to their unique style.

It is a lot easier to push a new plan through an organization if you get buy in from the managers who will be leading the teams. The closer you can get to appear as if your plan is their idea, the higher your chances of success. Of course this isn’t always easy and takes a lot of time. I have a small organization so I am able to spend quality time with my managers so that they can be empowered to make their own decisions that mirror company goals. With business partners it is always important to define what is in it for them. It is time to put them first and create strategies and plans that will help them succeed. That is how you get their attention. Once you have gotten them excited it is a lot easier to ensure that you will also win from their success.

How did you develop these skills?

I think my personality traits came from growing up in the Midwest and being instilled with a solid work ethic from a father who worked 80 hours a week and a mother who was the CFO of the household and lived life to its fullest. My tenacity comes from being surrounded by mostly boys as a child and always trying to keep up with their shenanigans even though I was much smaller.

My people skills come from being very social throughout every stage of my life. My more formal people skills came from observing Sales Representatives for years when I was working in Marketing. I was often taken out to dinner by these folks and marveled how their lives seemed so affluent and stress free and how fun they were to be around. I decided I wanted to explore that lifestyle and eventually took a job in Sales and went through some excellent formal sales training.

What training and life experience taught me is that “Selling is not Telling.” In fact, selling is 80% listening and 20% talking. It is amazing what you find out when you really listen to someone. People tell you what they need if you pay attention. But too often we don’t listen and we miss this critical information. I also learned the ABC’s. “Always Be Closing” is the motto of any good Sales Rep because they know that the quickest way to a sale is to have a plan of action that you stick to and are always focusing on the outcome of closing the sale.

“I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.”
— Diane Sawyer.

How do you become an executive/ leader?

To be an executive you need to look at the bigger picture of the business. You have to look outside your job title and your role and see how the company is going to achieve its success or failure. You have to understand the dynamics of the industry and be able to adapt quickly to changes in the environment. You have to understand the psychology of the teams you are working with and what motivates them. You have to understand the psychology of your business partners and create a win-win situation for them so that both of you can succeed. In many ways, you have to put your ego last, and understand that you are only as good as your team.

It is an incredibly tough role to be at the top. People are always looking to you for answers and sometimes you just don’t have them. Business Week’s cover story this week was titled “The CEO Trap.” It talked about how CEO’s are often treated as the scapegoat when things go wrong and how there is an enormous amount of pressure on CEO’s to perform.

There are many executives who understand this and are afraid to ask for help and even worse there are those executives who think they have all the answers when they don’t. A whole new crop of Executive Coaches has emerged to address these issues. I use one myself. They are invaluable helping me look outside of my circumstances and see clarity in simplicity when I could not find it myself.

The unfortunate thing about being a CEO is that everyone is looking to you for answers – not for questions. Your employees, your Board of Directors, your investors, and the press, are all looking to you for the vision and the blueprint for making the business a success. If you start to get a little lost in designing the way – who do you have to talk to? Not a lot of people. This is where executive coaches come in and can help you think through some of the tough questions you are facing and facilitate the process to an answer. They don’t give you the answer, they just give you a flashlight to help you find it.

I am fortunate to have spent time with a professional executive coach. I also have an informal coach who happens to be my husband Hans Bukow. He is currently the CEO of his own company, eWork.com. He is also fifteen year Executive veteran of startups and has raised over twenty five million dollars for his ventures. I can go to him with my questions and he provides me not only a flashlight, but also a spotlight – since he knows me so well, and sometimes he even has the answers. This definitely makes my life easier.

True leaders are not born they are made. Good leaders and executives learn from their mistakes and continue to grow as they acquire more experience. They look at obstacles as an opportunity to improve and then assimilate this information into their management “bag of tricks”.

How important are setting goals? How often should you update them?

Most motivational speakers will tell you that setting goals and writing them down is the difference between success and failure. It is very hard to shoot for something if you don’t even know what it is. I truly believe in setting goals and have done this since I was 12 years old. I have achieved most goals I set out to do including becoming a CEO.

The goals that I did not achieve turned out not to be right for me at the time. Even though I did not understand that then, and was disappointed, I did not dwell on failure, I only focused on my next success. It is so important to move on – to look forward and not to look back and punish yourself for not being perfect. There were so many things I thought I wanted when I was younger, and now looking back, I realize that I am very lucky I did not achieve some of the goals I had early on in my career. I wonder what would have happened if I got the CD-ROM production job I wanted right out of Grad school. I might have been lulled into the secure corporate life and never headed out on my own to start my own company. Who knows? The idea though is to trust and have faith that things will happen as they are supposed to. If one door closes another one opens and it usually leads to a better place. Realizing this is the key to eliminating your fear of failure and optimizing the path to your dreams.

When I started setting goals so long ago, I had no life experience to show me that I could achieve any them. Now my life experience has proved to me when I set a goal – I will achieve it, especially if it is “right” for me.

Haven’t you heard before, “You need to be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.” Keep this in mind before you set your goals. I had always said I wanted to be a CEO, but when I became one, I had to think twice if this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. It was so much more challenging and time-consuming than I expected.

You should update your goals when they are no longer fitting your needs. You have to make sure that you design a career and life that makes you happy. Because if you are not happy then you will not be at your peak performance and you are doing yourself and the company you work for a disservice. When you do something you love, everything snaps into place and work flows effortlessly. Don’t forget this and change your goals when you start to realize you are struggling or aren’t happy anymore and achieving your goal isn’t likely to improve the situation.

I am in the process of refining my goals and trying to create more balance in my life. I started to realize that being a CEO for the rest of my career would not afford me the type of lifestyle where I could be truly happy. So my next step is to give up the reigns as CEO and act more as the visionary for my organization and Chairman of the Board.

What has been the best piece of business advice you have received along the way in your career?

Stick to what you do best. I know what my best skills are and yet I have put myself into too many situations that rely more on my weaknesses than my strengths. My life would be much easier if I could construct an environment that weighed more heavily on my stronger skills. I am in the process of designing the MsMoney team to augment it with people who are stronger at the skills I am weak at.

Granted you can always learn new skills and adapt your nature to adjust to your environment, but true peace comes when you use the skills that are more natural to your personality.

What has been the best piece of personal advice you have received along the way in your career?

Think twice before acting. Many people tend to want to act quickly to resolve a crisis situation and often don’t think thoroughly through all the various paths. This is the time when a CEO has to be their best. They have to be calm under fire and behave the same way in the eye of the hurricane, where the skies are blue and the wind calm, as they do in the midst of the storm. I have the unique ability to maintain a clear head in some of the most dire work circumstances and project a sense of peace. This is so critical when in a challenging environment.

I still have room for improvement though. There are times where my emotions get the best of me (especially when it is not that important – like when I am on the phone with PacBell) and I may blurt something out without spending the time to realize how my comments might be interpreted. I have however improved tremendously in this arena over the last 10 years. Nothing like a little experience to prove that acting from your emotions can cause some real problems! (If you want PacBell to help you, then don’t get angry and yell at them, that is the surest way to get your phones shut off!)

What additional advice do you have for women that will help them in their careers?

Be grateful for things that you already have. You might hope to have it all, but you don’t have to have it all at one time. I look at my life and see how certain times I have felt I have had it all, and yet only years later my definition of what having it all meant, changed. So the best advice I can give is to be grateful for what you have at this time period of your life. The more you appreciate your current circumstance, the healthier you will be overall. You are more likely to attract additional good things to your life if you show gratitude for what you have accomplished so far.

I remember when I started my first business. Every time I acquired a new account I would internally feel gratitude and thankfulness for what I had achieved. I was still far from my final goals, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate the goodness in my life at that moment.

Sometimes when I start to feel a little depressed, I open a bottle of nice Cabernet and pour two glasses, one for myself and one for my husband. I then light a candle and we sit on our living room coach to think about what we have in our lives to be thankful for. We take turns and say something we are thankful for this day and then ching our glasses to commemorate the toast. It is amazing if you think about it, how much you really have to be thankful for and how good you will feel after pointing it out. Don’t be surprised if you finish your first glass of wine and you haven’t run out of things to toast about!

Be dependable not only to yourself but also to others. Being dependable means that you follow through on your promises. If that promise is to yourself to take a few yours away to pamper yourself so that you can return to work more refreshed, then you must follow through. Being dependable to others is very important so that people can predict your behavior and rely on you to carry through on business. This is a lesson I learned at my very first job.

Be on time. I am never ever late (unless mother nature intervenes) because I feel this shows that I respect whoever is waiting for me and it begins to show my dependable nature. As a businesswoman, people will respect you if you respect their time.

What are the skills women should be learning right now in order to excel in the future?

Business Week recently had a great article that says that women make better CEO’s than men. The interesting thing is that the researchers were “startled” by the results since the studies weren’t trying to prove that. Why do you think that is? I would have to say that I am a little startled by the results also. Now that I am a CEO I understand the challenges that a CEO faces. My initial impressions of being a CEO were that I had to be aggressive, controlling, competitive and THE problem solver. Not only is this behavior not in line with who I am truly am, but it was wrong and ineffective. This behavior, indicative of male CEO’s, has been found by company evaluations to be the opposite of what is needed to succeed in the New Economy.

In fact, more creative, flexible and open leadership is needed to steer through the multiple obstacles that companies face when they are driving to success. Gone are the days of the typical male-eccentric military model where “the troops” are talked at and only provided information on a “need to know” basis. Today’s worker, who is in high demand, expects open communication lines and demands to be listened to. The new breed of CEO’s who can adjust to the new rules of bureaucracy are those which are most likely to succeed. It is now about learning to listen and creating harmony in the organization. It is about building teams and getting those members to buy in to the ideas generated at the top.

Team members who feel like management cares about them are less likely to jump to the next hot job offer that comes across their desk (and those offers will come). If employees are feeling valued and are happy they are much more likely to produce quality work. They want conflicts addressed immediately so that their peace is not disrupted. CEO’s who can handle conflict are more likely to get better results from their people and lead a company to success.

All of these skills mentioned above are much more likely to be the strengths of women and not men. Women are more likely to put personal glory aside and act on behalf of the larger organization. It is just this type of thinking that makes them better CEO’s. The Business Week article quoted 4 different studies that showed that women were 50-85% better at the skills needed to survive in the New Economy than men. Some of those skills included: motivating others, fostering communications, producing high-quality work and listening to others.

Based on my experience, I would have to say once I spent more time mastering these skills instead of the original skills I thought I needed to have as a CEO, my organization was much more happier, healthier and successful.

We have another decade to determine if this is really true for the rest of the world. How many women do we think will be running the top 1000 corporations in the year 2010? If these studies were right, then I would expect more than six women to be the CEO (which is how many are CEO’s today).

What sort of opportunities does the “Internet Economy” present for women specifically?

The Internet economy has given me the opportunity to flourish. I was a pioneer in the fledgling New Economy and the world was my oyster. I had enormous opportunities open to me because the demand for those with my talent was extremely high. There was very little competition and the rules were not set yet so there was no predisposed gender bias. I still think there isn’t.

What are some good resources for women?

I would recommend reading at least 1 book a month that is timely and relevant to your business because this is information you will be expected to know. You should also subscribe to at least 3 industry magazines and peruse them for relevant topics every week.

I also recommend reading at least once a week, topics that focus on the softer side of things. Ideally this content should discuss motivation, inspiration and emotions. When you are an entrepreneur it is really easy to get yourself into a downward spiral and start thinking that you aren’t really capable of being on your own and running a company. So you need to read something that has a lot of positive messages in it. If you listen to the news frequently, you will notice that you are constantly bombarded by negative messages that can have an adverse affect on your psyche and cause you to be more pessimistic than you normally would be. Scientists actually did studies to prove this. As a result, I usually won’t watch programs with violence, and for that same reason, often won’t even watch the evening news.

I enjoy books with inspirational quotes and motivational messages, especially content that gives the reader the sense that they are 100% in control of their environment. One of my favorite thoughts I have read is: Change your thinking, change your life. You are in charge and you can achieve whatever you believe.

I have to be honest and say that my confidence and security comes from reading this type of material. I need these positive messages to keep me optimistic and upbeat. I definitely notice that when I take a few weeks or a month without centering myself with inspirational/motivational topics, that my enthusiasm starts to wane a bit and I start to get cynical. I call this stuff my happy drug! I need it to be at my best.

A friend of mine asked me after I launched the MsMoney.com website with the First Lady and a national TV crew, if I was afraid. I said no, of course not. But then I followed and said:

“If I knew I had to rely on this one event to define my success, then that would be scary. Instead, I trust and have faith that no matter what I do, that things will always work out for the best. This is what makes me fearless and allows me to pursue all the dreams.”

Ask yourself, “What would you do in your life if you knew you wouldn’t fail?”

Now go out there and do that! Don’t be afraid!

How does someone overcome the fear of failure?

Better than a Mercedes
Or a jewel laded ring
Is the indelibly memory
Of a non-material thing

For lovely things come
With hearts full of hope
And you shouldn’t worry
Or even stop to mope

There really is no such thing as failure
Nothing to get you down
It’s all in your head
So put on your golden crown

If you interpret everything as alright
Then you will never experience the night
Up in the heavens you will soar
If you realize life isn’t a chore

Come with me and experience the fun
Take your time there is no need to run
Stop and smell the roses and be full of smiles
The world is your oyster without all the guides

Imagine that you are the highest kite that can fly
Your life will then be free from the heaviest sigh
If you want to live where fear has no rule
You can experience free living without being a fool

Because sooner or later
If you live without fear
You will always be full of good cheer
And you will accomplish everything that is dear

Nothing can be done with fear. Fear robs your energy and blocks you from achieving your goals. So take proactive steps to try to eliminate the fear in your life.

I created the poem as a simple piece to help people think about what is truly important in life. Is it the big house, the fancy car, the designer clothing? Is this how you strive to define yourself? I hope not, because if you do, there will always be more things to buy and more people who have more than you. Also, if you base your self-worth by the things you own, then they will end up owning you instead. What happens if an earthquake eliminates all your possessions? (I think about that one since I live in the Marina in San Francisco.)

Think through what is important to you and by doing that you can start to more clearly define what you are really afraid of. Are you afraid your ego might get hurt? Do you define yourself strictly by your accomplishments and not by your values and integrity? Are you afraid a financial failure? Is it because you won’t be able to own all those nice things and that is what you need to be happy?

Once you pinpoint what happens if you fail, you will be better prepared to determine if you can live with that result.

If you are worried your ego might get hurt then – don’t take yourself so seriously!

I remembered the first time I learned to laugh at myself. I was about to move to San Francisco from Arizona and I wanted to get a nice new cosmopolitan hairstyle for my new job in the city. I thought I would get a trim and a perm to add some body to my hair, instead I got the perm from Hell. I went in with long straight blond hair and came out like a poodle that put their paw in an electric outlet. It was the worst thing you could ever imagine. Instead of leaving in tears and crying for the next few months, I laughed hysterically every time I looked in the mirror. It was so horrendous, how could I take my head seriously. I would make jokes about it to my friends and family, mostly so they wouldn’t feel sorry for me. There was nothing to feel sorry about. I laughed when I met strangers because they probably thought I wanted my hair to look like that.

Well I survived and my hair grew out, and now when I think about the event I still smile. It is not the circumstances that create our happiness, it is our interpretation of them. I feel like a really learned a lesson then, I was 23 years old and I was just starting to learn to laugh at myself. It was a wonderful thing and became something I would apply to my career for the next 11 years as I struggled to reach my goals and cope with failure.

You have to stop being afraid of making mistakes. If I never made mistakes, I would never be where I am today. I feel like I have made them all! Ok – well most of them. Probably because I never really knew what I was doing, after all no one told me. I had to figure things out for myself. You have to remember: the greater the risk, the greater the reward. I would like to add to that: the greater the risk, the greater the mistakes, the greater the reward. If you aren’t making enough mistakes, you probably aren’t living your life to the fullest.

If you are afraid of financial failure, spend some time assessing the non-material things you value such as nature and friendships.

What I have done to overcome the fear of financial failure is to detach myself from material things. I learned my lesson early with this one. By the time I was 27, I was living in a million dollar home, had a brand new beautiful convertible, went on expensive vacations, drank the best wine and ate the best restaurants. By the time I was 28, I had absolutely none of that. The only thing I had left was a master’s degree, a bunch of student loans and a lot of credit cards. I had seen all the material things disappear overnight with the “disappearance” (break-up) of my boyfriend. It was his stuff – not mine. That was how he defined himself not me. Well granted, I did define myself by his stuff when I had it for the five years I was with him. I was young and naive at one time. However, when I did not have it anymore, I had to redefine myself. I had to really decide what was important in my life and it wasn’t what made up his life.

I rebuilt my life and my foundation with truly beautiful things that could not ever be taken away from me such as; an appreciation of nature, a love of walking on the beach, good friends I could depend on, a family that loved me, a new career that I was passionate about, a value system that wasn’t in conflict with my lifestyle.

This is what changed my life. Once I detached myself from the material possessions I detached myself from the fear. After all, what did I have to lose now? I became grateful for each little thing that entered my life. A new computer, a new account, a new friend, a new plant, etc. I was living my life independently and loving every minute of it. From a materialistic standpoint, I only had a fraction of the “things” I was used to. But it didn’t matter, I was happier.

I would rather live in a studio and have the freedom to explore the world with wonder, than live in a mansion full of servants and wonder at nothing.

The interesting thing is that once I let go and let life take its course, the material possessions starting appearing back in my life. The house, the car, the clothes, the vacations, etc. But this time, I was not attached to them. They could all disappear and I would be just fine. I even keep my old car around, even though I have a brand new shiny one worth ten times as much. I do this just to remind myself I would be happy driving anything and could live without all the possessions.

One of my favorite anonymous quotes is below.

“The soul would have no rainbow, if the eyes had no tears.”

So go out there and live your life to the fullest and create some pain and sorrow – otherwise you won’t even know what happiness is when you see it!

Don’t be afraid of the shadow of fear, it only means that there must be sunshine nearby casting it’s light.

“I learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our disposition and not on our circumstances.”
— Martha Washington

Where can an entrepreneur go for help?

I would have to attribute my success as an entrepreneur early in my career to the networking groups I belonged to. I was on the Board of Women In Communications and have participated in many different Internet networking organizations over the years. Most top-notch organizations have seminars they sponsor that can help you learn the skills you will need in that field. It is also a good chance to meet people in your industry.

The connections you make with people are very important if you are starting your own business. I can’t emphasize this enough. My first dozen clients at Tiff.Com came from networking with women. Without networking and the support of women, Tiff.Com would have shut its doors and I would probably be working for some large corporation.

You can read a hundred books, but that isn’t good enough, you need to put those theories into practice. Being part of a networking group helps you do this and test out new ideas and plans.

Mentoring can also play an important role in a woman’s business career. I personally did not have any mentors – but I did surround myself with successful women who I met at networking events. Watching them gave me the confidence that I could be successful just like them.

I mentor a few fledgling entrepreneurs myself. It is a rewarding experience for both of us. Not only are they able to benefit from my knowledge and experience, but I also reap the rewards of learning through teaching. It gives me the opportunity to stretch my horizons and become involved in plans and ideas that I am interested in pursuing but don’t have the time to execute them myself. Mentoring keeps my strategic thinking muscles flexed and in good use. The old saying “Use it or lose it!” can certainly be applied to your brain.

I have also been exposed to educational seminars, networking and mentoring through a startup business incubator that MsMoney is part of. This special community is called the Women’s Technology Cluster and it focuses on creating a positive environment for women entrepreneurs. Studies show that companies that are part of incubators have a higher rate of success that those that don’t. My experience shows me that this is most likely because of the community support that is provided by these organizations. Being able to share your experience and learn knowledge from those in a similar circumstance is very valuable. Also having the ability to network amongst a greater pool of professionals can mean the difference between closing that next twenty million dollars in financing or NOT. If you have the opportunity to be part of an organization like this I would recommend it.

What should women avoid in the business world?

I would purposely stay away from negative people whenever you can. It is so easy for someone to put your business plan or idea down. This is really hard to do when you are out pitching to Venture Capitalists (but that is another story). It takes the rare individual who can see the same pot and the end of the rainbow as you do. I find that I am often confronted with negative people and have to proactively deal with them. The worst scenario is when you find you have a negative person working on your team. That person’s behavior can bring down a whole organization if not kept in check. What I usually do, is try to confront the situation as soon as possible and turn around that individuals thinking. Or if that isn’t working – I won’t hesitate to ask them to leave my organization.

Another dilemma I have had is working on teams with clients where one of their team members has a negative disposition. This is more difficult to confront because you don’t have any managerial control over their work or environment. This has not happened very often to me, but when it has, I have turned down future work from that client, because I will not subject myself, or my team to their negativity.

You only have one life to live, so you should fill it will as many positive experiences as possible. When you are confronted with negativity, don’t just sit back and let it happen, do what you can to change the circumstances.

Keep in mind thought that not everything is in your control. Another one of my favorite quotes is below.

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change those I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

What must women do differently than men in order to succeed?

Spend time learning the source of problems and not just trying to cover them up with a quick fix. Women are very good at this because they are more likely to initiate conversation to determine where the problems lie and are willing to talk about it. Corporations (mostly run by men) are very bad at this because it takes a lot of effort to fix big problems and it is easier to patch the symptoms than to treat the problem.

Women who want to “have it all” should draw this same analogy into their personal lives. Because you can’t be your best in the work place if your home place is out of order. Women are much more prone to talk about their issues and to seek self-help advice than men. So we should use this tendency to our advantage. Men, in their personal lives, are more likely to run from conversation and introspection and buy flowers hoping that roses will fix everything.

The issues we face as women can be daunting. We are under so much pressure to be perfect at everything we do; the perfect executive, the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect daughter, etc. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with these predefined perceptions the world places on us and we often become disillusioned.

“Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”
— Erica Jong – Writer

Aren’t we always feeling guilty about something? If you spend too much time at work, you feel guilty you are not spending enough time at home. When you spend too much time at home, you feel like you are not spending enough time at work. When you do too much for others you feel like you should spend more time on yourself. When you spend any time on yourself you feel selfish. Yikes! How do we survive and feel like we can have it all?

It is not easy because we are often held back by our own bad habits and negative thinking. We usually try to treat the symptoms that arise, instead of treating the underlying problem that is causing these surface symptoms to appear over and over again. Guilt might be the real problem in our life and a symptom might be something like depression, weight gain, or insomnia, which we then might try to treat with a quick fix such as compulsive shopping (retail therapy) and diet or sleeping pills. What we get as a result might temporarily fix the depression and weight gain, but we also end up with more problems such as debt and poor health. Not at all what we intended.

We spend our lives trying to patch up these small symptoms and the minute one goes away another one crops up. It is an endless cycle – so what is the point? Stop dealing with the symptoms and take the time to figure out what is really the underlying problem manifesting this behavior. This is NOT an easy process and it takes a lot of courage to look at your flaws straight in the face. It is a lifelong journey into your psyche and soul, but the benefits of freeing yourself from the things weighing you down will allow you to soar through life with unbounded happiness and enter your own Utopia.

I know what my underlying problems are and how they manifest themselves in my life. They say that identifying and admitting the problem is the first step to helping cure it. I also understand that I am not perfect and that healing myself is a long journey that will take my time and attention. In the meantime while I walk down that path to self-actualization, I still have to cope with some of the annoying little symptoms and forgive myself for not having all the answers.

Meg Ryan sums up a great way of thinking; “Oh, I’m so inadequate – and I love myself!”

“Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them, but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight. When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is brought in our life, or in the life of another.”
— Helen Keller

What are some good ways to relieve stress that often arises when women try to do too much?

Eat Right. This is so important. You need your energy if you are “doing too much.” Ok -even I don’t have the time to eat right sometimes, but I always take my vitamins. So find yourself a good antioxidant multi-vitamin and take it every day.

Drink lots of water. You have heard this over and over – 8 glasses a day. I probably drink 10 glasses a day. Yes you will have to go to the bathroom all the time – but it is well worth it. You need to stay hydrated to have energy and to flush out all those antioxidants caused by stress.

Breath. How often when you are stressed do you actually hold your breath? This is the worst thing you can do. Take a deeeeep breath and let it out. All of a sudden things seem better. My husband is always making fun of me when I let out these huge sighs. I don’t even notice I am doing it half of the time. It is a natural mechanism for me now so that when I am stressed, I sigh deeply.

Stretch. Most people carry their stress in the neck and back which can really make you cranky at the end of the long day. So wake up and stretch those neck and back muscles for 10 minutes. Stretch another 5 minutes in the middle of the day and 10 minutes when you get home. If I forget to stretch because I am rushing into my day, my dog always reminds me. The first thing she does when she gets up from sleeping the night, or even a nap, is stretch. First she puts her paws way out in front of her and her head low to the ground. Then she stretches the left foot way out, then the right foot, and then puts her butt way up in the air. Same thing every time, she never forgets. How does she know to do stretch and most people don’t?

Work out. This is the best thing for me when I start getting anxiety from having too much to do. I have all this nervous energy and I need to get it out somehow. Nothing like thirty minutes on the StairMaster to get the endorphin’s flowing and my brain cells sharpened.

Smile. Also, relax your face, open your jaw and move it around. Start to feel the muscles loosen and then settle on a neutral uplifting position. Scientists have proven that the physical act of smiling creates positive feelings in your brain. How is that for a quick fix?

Soak in the tub. My favorite thing to do at the end of the day. I just imagine all those cares and worries melting away in the heat and washing down the drain. Calgon take me away!

Light a candle. Or if you can, build a fire in your fireplace. Just watching the flames trickle and flick randomly around the logs (or the candle) will help connect you with nature and disconnect you from work.

Listen to Music. Really listen to it and pay attention to the rhythm, the instruments, the words. Depending on your mood – sometimes you want it loud and upbeat, sometimes you want it soft and soothing. Music helps me escape my immediate reality and places me in another world without a To Do list. I recommend listening to classical music – this will help you exercise your mind.

Be nice. Do something nice for someone and notice how good you will feel.

Think about the Universe. There are 150 billion stars in the sky and a billion other galaxies in our Universe. There are stars exploding into supernovas and collapsing in black holes. There is beauty and mystery in the infinite. Now think about the problem facing you. Doesn’t seem so humongous anymore does it? I have always loved Astronomy and Carl Sagan because they help me put my life in perspective within the Grand Life of the Universe.

Walk on the beach. I do this one a lot. The soothing sound of the water lapping on the sand will wash away your troubles. Think about how the tides may change but things fundamentally stay the same and the sun will always come up tomorrow.

Walk in the woods. Enjoy the majestic trees and the delicate plants and appreciate the harmony of life. These plants are breathing in our carbon dioxide and turning it into oxygen so we can then breath it again; a nice a simple symbiotic relationship.

Go to a Library. Being surrounded by peace and quiet can be wonderful all by itself, but you are also surrounded by thousands of years in knowledge.

Wear comfortable clothes. What is the first thing you do when you get home after work? Put on comfortable clothes right? What about wearing comfortable clothes to work. I am the first to sacrifice a little fashion in my clothes and shoes and decide up those that stretch and move with me during my active days.

Look at pictures of happy memories. I tend to do this more often when my husband is away on business for a long time. I have a photo album of my favorite pictures of him during our fun-filled adventures. They always make me smile.

Slow down. This is by far the toughest one for me. My brain is whirling at a hundred miles a minute, I am not happy if I am not multitasking. I talk fast, I type as fast as I talk, I walk fast, read fast, eat fast – and I should slow down? Yes. Not only should I slow down, but I also can’t expect the world to operate as quickly as I do. Patience is a virtue and it is something I have to work hard at.

Refresh Now. Go to www.refreshnow.com and take a few minutes each day during work to refresh your spirit.

Do women have to make sacrifices to have a successful career?

Being a married woman in my 30’s, I am faced with the difficult decisions of creating life balance and starting a family. I will definitely have to make sacrifices in my career so that I can accomplish these personal goals. Right now I spend 90% of my energy on my career and I really don’t have room for much else. I will eventually have to drop that to 50% so that I can live a more balanced life. It doesn’t mean that my career will stop being successful, it just means that the ways I define success in my career will have to change.

Is there any way to have children and still be on an “executive track?” How do you go about doing this?

This is the biggest challenge I will be facing in the next few years. I brought a dog into my life so that I could begin to understand some of the issues involved in the care and feeding of something besides myself. I take her to work every day but have so little time to interact with her. When I don’t spend at least an hour of quality time with her a day (which believe it or not is sometimes difficult to spare), she gets very ornery and misbehaves. This is a great lesson for me as I approach Motherhood. I can’t possibly work as much as I do and raise a healthy and happy child. So I will have to learn to redefine my role as an Executive. It doesn’t mean I stop being an Executive, it means I have to set boundaries and times for being an Executive and times and boundaries for being a Mother. Being a parent truly is like having a second job and it needs equal time and attention. Right now my time and attention is only on MsMoney.

What rules do you think women should follow to be successful?

“If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”
— Katherine Hepburn

“The thing that women have got to learn is that nobody gives you power. You just take it!”
— Roseanne Barr

My advice – create your own rules. And read the book “Bad Girls Guide to Getting What You Want” for a little humor.

What advice do you have for women just starting their careers?

Live by example, it will have much more impact that any words you could impart.

Remember that happiness is not a destination but a way of traveling.

Do something you love!

You will notice as you progress in your career and have added life experiences that you will become more discontented with the status qua. As you mature you are more likely to start challenging commonly help perceptions and will aspire for a better way. This is probably why many women start their own businesses later in their career. Women are leaving the corporate world at twice the rate of men because they are getting fed up with the system.

What advice do you have for women who are our striving to succeed and have it all?

Executives get so caught up in the details of living that they forget to live. I had this problem as the CEO of MsMoney. I spent all my time and energy trying to ensure MsMoney’s success and sacrificed everything else in my life. How could I have realistically expected that this would make me happy? I regret now not relying more on my friends to pull me up during my times of weariness. When you make it to the top of the Executive ranks, you start to adapt this “I can do everything myself” – attitude. This can lead to loneliness if you don’t balance it with healthy and nurturing relationships. You don’t have to go it alone. Typically those who have made it to the top have had some sort of support system. Find out what yours is and use it when you need it.

Friends are there when you are weary and their influence can flavor your life with sunshine.

Just two years prior to starting MsMoney, when my former business, Tiff.Com, was at its peak, I put it all aside to take a year off around the world for my honeymoon. Many people commented that they would never consider taking this time off at the most critical period of their career and especially when the Internet was so HOT.

I remember how hard I worked to get Tiff.Com where it was. It took years and a lot of risk and learning to get to that point. Was I to give it all up? I thought, what if I can’t duplicate the same success when I returned? What if people don’t take me seriously because I did this? I agonized at times over the decision. But when it came down to it, my new fiancĂ© and I agreed that starting our lives together with a year trip around the world would be an unforgettable experience and would build a foundation and bonds between us that would last a lifetime.

“When two people love each other, they don’t look at each other, they look in the same direction.”
— Ginger Rogers

Hans and I were looking in the same direction and we both put our successful careers on hold and risked everything for this trip. Fundamentally we kept our faith that when we returned, we would continue being entrepreneurs and spend our time working for causes that we were passionate about.

We ignored the warnings of friends and family and headed out on our personal adventure. We stood for what we believed in, regardless of what others said, because opinions are generally a fleeting thing, but our values are forever.

The world trip was the most amazing experience of my life and we have two thousand pictures and forty hours of video to look back upon. We even created a website that contained our photos and stories. I am currently writing a book about it called “The Millennium Odyssey – Discovering the 7 Wonders of the New World.”

We returned safely home a year later and luckily the Dotcom mania had even picked up speed. We had no problem raising excitement and money for our new ventures.

So, why when I became a CEO of my new venture, hadn’t I learned from the world trip experience and strove to create some sort of balance in my life? It appeared that I was an “all or nothing” kind of person. It was difficult to find the middle road between taking a year off and working intensely seventy hours a week. I finally starting to realize, at 34 years old, that having it all meant that different pieces of it will appear at different periods of my life, and when I started to approach the end of my days, what I will be left with would be a beautiful and self-fulfilling picture.

“At the end of your life you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.”
— Barbara Bush

“We must know that we have been created for greater things, not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and to be loved.”
— Mother Teresa

What inspires you to strive towards such difficult career goals?

I am inspired by people who have overcome enormous obstacles on their way to achieving success. I have a lot of respect for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton because of her strength and courage. Consider everything that she survived as the First Lady and her grace in handling various situations with the press and the public. Most people would shrink from society, but instead she dusted off the debris and moved on and did not let it stop her. The fact that she had the tenacity and optimism to pursue her own dreams without letting the masses get her down, is amazing. The fact that she won the New York Senate race even though people constantly told her she wouldn’t is a testament to the fact that we as women are incredibly resilient and accomplish anything we put our minds to.

“A woman is like a teabag, you don’t know her strength until she is in hot water!”
— Nancy Reagan

I often have people come to me to ask me how I overcame such odds to get where I am today. They want to know how they could possibly achieve a fraction of what I have and what has inspired me to keep pushing along even though I had so many obstacles.

I like to bring up that there is nothing unique about me except my undying commitment to achieve what I set out to do. And the fact that I truly believe I can accomplish it regardless of the odds. I try to convince people that they can do anything they set their mind to. Why not?

Think about Helen Keller and the odds she overcame in her life. She was deaf and blind and diagnosed as being without intelligence. She didn’t let others “opinions” of her stop her from living life to the fullest with whatever gifts she did posses. This is someone who didn’t live in bitterness that she was robbed of her sight and her hearing, instead she moved passed that and used her other senses and faculties to explore the world in wonder. I quote her numerously throughout my writing because she has such an inspirational story to tell. No obstacle I have ever overcome has been of the same magnitude as hers.

Don’t be afraid to follow your dreams even though the obstacles seem too much. It is your life and you are the only one who can decide how your want to live it. So get started.

I would never be where I am today if I believed only what OTHERS told me I would achieve.

What are the three most important things it takes to succeed on both a business and personal level in the 21st century?

Optimistic Vision
Tenacity
Flexibility

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope.”
— Helen Keller.

 

Tiffany Bass Bukow
Founder & CEO of MsMoney.com, Inc.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is a veteran Netpreneur who has founded and managed two successful Internet companies over the last 7 years. She started her first company, Tiff.Com, in 1995. Tiff.Com is an Internet Consulting company that has helped numerous Fortune 500 clients with their strategic marketing efforts online. While serving as President of Tiff.com for 5 years, she led a team of 20 professionals in the design and development of Web sites for industry leaders such as America Online, Sun Micro-systems, Lucent, Xerox, Microsoft and Bechtel.

In 1999, Tiffany founded MsMoney.com Inc. and has served as CEO for over two years. MsMoney.com Inc. is a Financial Services company focused on empowering people to become financially healthy. Though MsMoney.com offers something for everyone, it has a special focus on addressing women’s unique financial needs. Tiffany raised several million dollars from investors and used this capital to propel MsMoney.com into the limelight. MsMoney.com received numerous press mentions including The Wall Street Journal, TIME, CNN, PBS, ABC News, MSNBC, CBS Marketwatch, Fortune, Forbes and Business Week, in addition to receiving awards from Yahoo! and USA Today. The MsMoney.com Web site is part of a network of 5 million visitors.

In the year 2000, Tiffany saw the need to help other financial services companies use their Web sites more effectively to reach their customers and improve sales. So she started a consulting division of MsMoney.com Inc., called MoneyPortals. MoneyPortals offers prepackaged content, Web site design and development, and marketing assistance to some of the world’s largest banks such as Wells Fargo with 2.5 million online banking customers and Guardian Insurance with 4.5 million customers.

Tiffany is an acclaimed international speaker and has been featured at Internet industry conferences, Financial Services conferences, Marketing forums, Women’s events and as a weekly host for Sony’s Redband Radio show called MoneySense. She has appeared on ABC News with Peter Jennings, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Digital West on PBS, and on CBS, which covered the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s participation in the launch of MsMoney.com.

Tiffany dedicates part of her time to social entrepreneurship. She is the founder and Chairman of the Get-Smart.Org Foundation, which is a non-profit corporation dedicated to educating teens about modern day issues and inspiring them to live safer, healthier and happier lives.

Tiffany is featured in a new book called “Inside the Minds: Leading Women – What it Takes for Women to Succeed and Have it All in the 21st Century.” Tiffany has been living in San Francisco for 10 years and is originally from Chicago. Her educational background includes a Masters Degree in Instructional Technologies with a focus on Multimedia and a Bachelors Degree in Business with a focus on Marketing and MIS.