It doesn’t matter what stage of life you’re in: everyone wants to be the best they can. When you see very successful business leaders, there can be a sort of “false aura” of unreachable success around them. If you can get beyond their paycheck, you will realize that the strategies they use can be applied by anyone. For example, when you look at the three founders of BlogHer, one of the largest publishing networks for women online, you will see that anyone can achieve what they call “World Domination.” How successful is BlogHer? In the last four years, the company has paid out $36 million to 5,700 bloggers. The successful strategies of BlogHer’s three female leaders can be replicated by anyone.
Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page, and Jory Des Jardins, BlogHer’s three founders, all left safe, stable careers for the unknown. Why? They wanted to be happy. Each of them had a wake-up call, realizing their careers were not fulfilling but rather they were merely working at a “job.” Life is too short to just have a “job.” Your work is such a large part of your life—why not be happy doing it?
While their paths before BlogHer were different (Stone worked at CNN, Des Jardins worked in publishing, and Camahort Page in Silicon Valley), they all shared the same four traits that led them to achieve success: courage, focus, the ability to listen, and passion.
Courage: Leaving a stable job to pursue your dream is hard. While you may have something gnawing in your stomach telling you to go for it, you still feel comfortable at your current, stable job. This is natural. It took Des Jardins three tries to leave her publishing job. What finally sparked her to make the leap: “I had just reached my point. It was so powerful doing my own thing that it got to the point that the risk of not doing it outweighed the risk of doing it.”
Focus: The creation of BlogHer was very organic. The founders created a space that they themselves wanted. At the time, there was no place for women bloggers to really get to know each other. The desire to create that community drove every decision Stone, Des Jardins, and Camahort Page made when building BlogHer, and provided the company’s guiding focus.
Even to this day, when the success of BlogHer means Fortune 500 companies are clamoring to hear the founders’ insights into the key female consumer demographic, their focus remains unaltered. They are constantly asking themselves how BlogHer can remain relevant. This does not mean BlogHer changes its mission focus. Any good business leader constantly molds their company based on the environment they are working in; a company is a living and breathing thing that is nurtured through culture, the people in the organization, and the way it is lead. But BlogHer’s founders understand that they want to stay with the times, not become obsolete, while still maintaining the overall guiding focus that has brought the company so far already.
Listening: Stone maintains that a good leader leads by listening. It enables leaders to steer the course and helps measure ideas. A good idea is one that grows and attracts others. In order to do so, listening to others is paramount. Des Jardins builds on to this concept, saying, “For example, rather than telling bloggers what the sessions were going to be for our conference and how the experience would be, it was this constant curation. What we did was simply build a business based on what we would have wanted as bloggers ourselves.” Stone adds that this approach was their key to success: “We said, ‘OK, online community, what do you want? What is your motivation? What do you want to accomplish with your blog? With your family and with your life?’ And based on that, we developed different opportunities for them to communicate, which also became a great business model.”
Passion: Without passion, BlogHer would not be what it is today. Passion helped fuel their journey. The trio was so committed to success and getting the company off the ground that they went without pay for two years (while still paying their employees). “The growth trajectory of a startup is very difficult to plot out,” explains Camahort Page. “We bootstrapped it for a really long time. I went through my entire two years of savings, opened a home equity line of credit, and racked up credit card debt. We were paying a lot of people and not always paying ourselves. We saw this growth and knew there would be more growth.” Passion doesn’t pay the bills but it does give you the sustenance to withstand the highs and lows of running a company.
By using these four traits, these female entrepreneurs were able to identify an opportunity and create a successful company based on their vision. Breaking the four traits down helps put them in perspective and shows that you have the power of world domination inside you. You just have to find the courage, focus, ability to listen, and passion within yourself to get started.
Lori Ann LaRocco is the author of OPPORTUNITY KNOCKING: Lessons from Business Leaders. This new leadership title has been praised by Steve Forbes and Donald Trump, among many others, and LaRocco has been featured on BlogHer, Under the Rug, Forbes.com, and CNBC.com. In Opportunity Knocking, LaRocco gets some of the biggest names in business to spill their secrets to success. LaRocco’s candid, insightful interviews with nine successful business leaders marshall a breadth of wisdom from CEOs and entrepreneurs across varied industries.
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