25 Years In Successfully Self-Employed - Marcia Yudkin

Marcia Yudkin’s celebrating her 25 years of successful self-employment by boiling down some things she’s learned…“Insights From 25 Years in Business”.

Here are the first 2 installments…

Lesson #1: Your first big success contains clues to a dynamic that comes easily to you.
Figure out how to harness that strength, give it a good run on a regular basis and you’ll experience a champion series of successes.

On January 4, 1981, my first published article appeared in the Sunday New York Times. One tantalizing sentence in my query letter to them two months before had opened that door of opportunity: “In January, I will be retiring from college teaching at the age of 28 and want to write about what it has been like to be a professor, compared with the way I saw
professors when I was a student.”

With that sentence, I promised an out-of-the-ordinary story skillfully told. This they wanted.

For me, words have opened doors over and over again. I’d be loony to forget this.

For others, impulsive calls or old connections sparked their first and later successes. Repeat what worked!

Lesson #2: Customer comments can contain pure gold.
Many of my most in-demand services came about from a suggestion made by someone who wanted to do business with me.

A decade ago, someone emailed, “I want to learn how to be you. Can you teach me?” I emailed back, “What do you mean?” We worked out a tutorial program through which I passed on my marketing consulting skills. With minor updates, that training program has proved a consistent seller.

Years before that, a Harvard professor called and said he couldn’t make my seminar. Could I present it to him at his office, privately? I met with him weekly and gradually realized what I was doing for him had a name: Consulting. Undoubtedly others would want that too, I guessed, correctly.

When I started teaching seminars, the topics I knew the most about were already taken. The director of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education suggested “So You Want to Write a Book,” a class that generated long waiting lists year after year.