Two Amazing Business People from History (Who May Surprise You!)

#75. Sevana and Tiffany share two successful business people from history who aren't given much spotlight but amazing in their own rights nonetheless and worth showcasing in today's episode. These super successful business people have inspired Sevana and Tiffany and they hope the stories can inspire you!

Got questions or have a topic you want Sevana and Tiffany to cover? Email them at thebusinessbehindsmallbusiness@gmail.com and see your question answers or topic of interest discussed on a future episode!

**************************** About BBSB - We are two business owners with two very different perspectives on building business, and the business behind that in order to achieve your goals. One of us built to sell, and will continue on the serial entrepreneur path, which means your focus and drive should include very particular tools and tips in order to achieve your goal. The other, is building a generational business, one that can go on long after she’s let go of the wheel. This type of business also requires very specific tools and platforms to achieve this goal. Both women have been successful in their own right, but in honesty - haven’t scratched the surface! Sponsorship Opportunities - Email us here: thebusinessbehindsmallbusiness@gmail.com Website - Check out our website! https://www.thebusinessbehindsmallbusiness.com Notice - As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. These earnings contribute towards the costs of creating this podcast and we greatly appreciate your support! Disclaimer - We are NOT licensed financial experts, nor do we give financial advice. Anything we share with you here on our podcast, whether it be a personal experience or submission, or advice/tips that have worked for us, or that we believe would work for you should not be viewed as either financial, business, or tax advice. We ask for you to do your research, have open and honest conversations with your company’s own support providers and make decisions based upon that. Throughout this broadcast we will share our knowledge and give suggestions and hope you will receive them as part of your overall research to better your own company.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone. Thank you for listening to our podcast. Tiffany and I give our all to this podcast with curating information, researching platforms, and creating a show with the best up-to-date information we can. We have a vested interest in the growth and health of your business and hope you feel the same way about us. Would you like to produce a show? Of course you would. All you have to do is email us at the businessbehind small business at gmail.com to express your interest and we will share with you all of the marketing opportunities you will get in exchange. Please support us so that we can continue supporting you. And with that, we welcome you to our show, The Business Behind Small Business. Whether you're selling or staying, we are here to remind you that just because you own a business, that does not mean you are a business owner. Nope. We are your hosts, Savannah Stone and Tiffany Gale. That's it. Sharing the more finite details of entrepreneurship. Revealing the dots. Sharing the more finite details of entrepreneurship. Revealing the dots between startup and success. No one gets to a million without getting a little dirty. There's a lot of business behind small business, so let's get to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:20

Let's start. What are we talking about today?

SPEAKER_00 1:23

All right. So, well, there's no sense in asking whose idea it was for today's show.

SPEAKER_02 1:29

If you've been listening to our show, you'll probably be right with your first guest.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

It was who decided today's topics.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

All right. So let me explain my inspiration here. Uh, we all look to someone when it comes to growing our businesses. Oftentimes it's someone that we already know. Sometimes it's a family member or maybe someone else that we have a relationship with. But a lot of times there's someone in history that really motivates us. Uh, sometimes it's someone we know from television or from books that just really knocked it out of the park, or someone we learned about in school. This person could have inspired us, these people could have inspired us to be more and to do more, and that is the inspiration for today's episode. So today we're gonna dive into influential persons and in history and why we're drawn to them, and what can we glean from them? Before we begin, please note our disclaimer. This is available in both our show notes and on our website and should be referred to before and or after this podcast.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Okay, so I feel like we should shake it up and have you start.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

What? Oh what an audible. Come on, come on, come on.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

This is your jam. Let's go.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Alright, alright, alright, fine.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

I'm putting myself in a very sensitive position here to have to follow up the history buff here, like you are.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

So all right, all right, fine. Okay, so I don't think I've made it a secret who my entrepreneurial crushes are. I talk about Ruth Handler and Marjorie Merriweather Post every chance I get. I mean, it's almost turned into a drinking game, I feel like. But they are the most amazing business owners of whom I've had the honor of reading a lot about. Um, but I'm not gonna go talking about either of them because I feel like you guys have heard enough about them from me. And plus, the Barbie movie, I feel like, has really opened up a lot of avenues about Ruth Handler, which I think is fantastic. So the woman that I'm going to talk about or is so inspirational and so influential to my life growing up. Even at a young age, I knew she was a trailblazer, and I mean she had to be. She was nothing like her contemporaries. And as an adult, when I went back to read about her life, I really could not believe how she not only made a her mess, her message, but became one of the most powerful women in Hollywood and perhaps I'd say in history. Drumroll. Okay. Lucille Ball was born August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York. Her father worked for the Bell Telephone Company, and because of his career, they frequently moved during her early childhood. When Lucille was three years old, her father passed away from typhoid fever at the age of 27. Her mother was pregnant at the time with her second child, and so she and her mother returned to New York to live with her mother's parents. Her aunt and uncle and their daughter, I believe her name was Cleo, lived there as well. Lucy's mother remarried a man who didn't really want kids, and he convinced her mother to leave Lucy with his parents. Cleo continued to grow up in a loving environment with Lucy's grandparents. However, for Lucy, her time with her step-grandparents was severe and polarizing. Her stepgrandparents were a puritanical Swedish couple who banished all mirrors from the house except for the one over the bathroom sink. I think there was a story about how she like gazed into the into the um bathroom mirror longer than what they deemed appropriate and they beat her for it. Seems very intense. Intense. So uh for the sake of time, I'm just gonna go fast forward now to when Lucy had already begun her acting career. In 1948, Ball was cast as a wacky wife in My Favorite Husband, which was a radio show for CBS. The show was so successful that CBS asked her to develop it for television. She agreed, but only if she could work with her real life husband, Cuban band leader, Desi Arnez. CBS did not believe that the general public would buy this beautiful white woman being married to a Cuban man, and so there was a lot of pushback. Lucy could have taken it. She could have been like, okay, you're right, I should be married to a white guy, I'll leave Desi at home. But she didn't. She really wanted Desi to have a voice. And not only did she want Desi to have a voice, she wanted him to have an appropriate income. So she decided to create Desi Lu Productions. And the production company was what produced I Love Lucy. Isn't that crazy? That was smart. That was smart of her because you know Desi was not going to be making the same amount as everybody else. So, anyway, she also knew her place as a woman in Hollywood. So she let her husband run Desi Lu and for all intents and purposes, allowed everyone to believe that he was the owner and of the founder of Desi Lu.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

When um, just so we get a context, what year is this? What decade are we talking about?

SPEAKER_00 6:45

I believe that was 1948 at that point.

SPEAKER_02 6:47

40? I was gonna say 40s or 50s, okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:50

So my better off letting a man run it for the world.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Absolutely. So my favorite husband became I Love Lucy, and it was the real first real sitcom developed by a husband and wife team. Uh Desi Lu Studios pioneered the multi-camera shot, and it was filmed in front of a live audience, which was never done prior to that. So if you had wanted to do uh if you had wanted to do it the original way it was done with one camera, they would have to film the same uh scene with audience laughter three different times. So instead they had three different cameras, and they they pioneered that. Like that's insane. We think about that. Nobody thought of that before. Exactly. Well, they were the first real sitcom. There was no such thing as a sitcom prior to them. Isn't that incredible? So uh she also pioneered having distinct sets that were adjacent to each other. So like us uh one set is the kitchen and the other set is the living room, instead of having it like uh like a play would be, you know, where everything is in one place.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

Right? So it's like more dynamics, right? Like you feel like you're traveling with the show instead of just being in one place.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

So you actually feel like you're traveling from one, from right, you actually are in a kitchen. You're not in what what the audience is to believe is the kitchen. Uh when Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz divorced, uh Lucy bought Arnez's shares and she became the 100% controller of the production company. During this time, Lucille produced several popular shows. I'm only gonna name a few: The Untouchables, Star Trek, and Mission Impossible.

SPEAKER_02 8:41

I know people don't know that she did Star Trek and Mission Impossible. That's how I love her.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

I know, and and the crazy thing is that no other studio wanted to touch Star Trek.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

Well, it was so controversial at the time, too. Like they were he was also trying to make a statement, right? Gene Roddenberry was trying to make a statement, a lot of political statement within in a way, and you know, doing it with aliens made it less more palatable to the audience. Right. So yes, nobody wanted to touch it.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

And fun fact, it was the first television show to air an interracial kiss. Yes. Yeah, so in 1967, she sold the shares of her studio for 155 million in today's dollars, and that studio was renamed Paramount Television. Well, I've heard of those. I think I streamed that. Oh yeah, yeah, so do I. I watched it last night. So now you're a small little place. I mean, right? So now you're probably wondering what it was about Lucia Ball that I found so inspirational. Well, like her, when someone would tell her, no, you can't do that, or no, you're not allowed, she created the path by creating her production studio. Um I also found that um on a at a very young age, I loved watching her because Desi would always tell Lucy, no, you can't do that. And she would be like, All right, fine. But then she would just went through with it, she still did it. And you know, even if what she did was like it blew up in her face in one way or another, she was still doing it. Like girlfriend was taking chances, even if she had to show it. Like she kept that she was thinking about having to shovel the chocolate in her mouth just to just so you know. I find I find I have been in that situation multiple times. So shoveling cookies in your mouth. Yeah. No, I mean like symbolically, where where you're like trying to hide what you're what so that you don't get in trouble, but like here you are, like, oh my god, what am I gonna do?

SPEAKER_02 10:50

So but no, I mean it just sounds like you know, we were kind of talking about before we started recording, which was you know, do like don't sometimes you just don't overthink things, just do it. It sounds like she just did it. When somebody told her no, somebody who was taking loud, that's sounds like a bad idea, she's like, Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

Yep, yeah, absolutely. She took chances. She was the first woman to own a major studio, and she not only invested in herself, she invested in the future of others. Lucille Ball also reads.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

She ran a multimillion dollar production studio. So it's it's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Yeah. Uh, I believe that the final women's right within a marriage was, which I'm not gonna talk about what it was. You can look it up. Um the final right for a woman in a marriage was given to women in 1994. Where a women did woman did not have to Yeah, 1994. Mm-hmm. I'll I'll I'll talk about it offline.

unknown 12:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:07

1994. I didn't realize it was so soon. I I knew that like I knew that like for uh women to open open their own personal bank accounts, it was like in the 70s, and I don't think it was until the 80s. Yeah, until they were able late 80s, until they were open to able to open a business bank account.

unknown 12:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 12:25

Or like, you know, business bank account to even buy houses and all that stuff, like without a husband or a male relative until like the late 80s, which that always blows my mind, being somebody who, you know, was actually alive in the 80s, not realizing that this was, you know, it didn't matter to me because I wasn't an adolescent then, but like I just didn't know it was so so recent.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Mm-hmm. Yeah, women didn't have a whole lot of rights in within marriage. And um, one of the biggest rights within a marriage was not deemed a right until 1994, which again blows my mind because like still makes the stuff that she did so amazing, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:00

Like to be in that world in decade.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

I was engaged to be married in 1994. So if anybody wants to like bring that to real to a real place, I got married in 96. So yeah, crazy. So um, so anyway, she also reinvented herself um multiple times, actually. Uh she reinvented herself and she still honored her own brand because when she first started out, she was considered a B movie actress. She you can look up even pictures of her that are very glamorous, these very glamour glamorous photos of her. Um and then like she kind of went into comedy. She wasn't a she wasn't a storied comedian. Um, I see. But you know, she went on to create a television show that was the most historically successful of all time. And and don't forget, no one believed that a woman with her hair and her looks could ever be found attractive, much less believable to have been married to a Cuban man. And Cuba, you know, at this time was communist. And uh Lucille Ball was also framed as a communist, um which you can you you can read you can read about. I'm not gonna go into it, but uh regardless, like that it wasn't just her looks, it was also her she wasn't a communist, but it was she had a lot going on. Um well and I'm not gonna sleep on Desi Arnaz either. He knew the financial benefits of reruns, and by doing that, he created syndication. And by buying the episodes of I Love Lucy from CBS, he was able to retain the integrity of the show and create a financial legacy for his children. See, very smart. Right. So what do you what do you got?

SPEAKER_02 14:47

Okay, so I was trying to find so I feel like I've talked about Sarah Blakely a lot of times on our podcast. And I've also already like talked about Dame uh Stephanie Shirley, which is also a situation for me. So then I was kind of like, all right, you know, I don't want to like use the same, you know. Let me let me go let me go think about this. So then I settled, not settled, but I was thinking about you'll see where this is going eventually. Okay, I was thinking about Julia because uh Julia Childs, right? Because I just loved this thing about her, and I've read the books about her and just how her like fascinating career started at like the ripe old age of like late 50s, early 60s, and also groundbreaking in a lot of areas in TV industry, right? Because nobody thought somebody with her looks and the stuff she was cooking would ever be popular, and she's made so much like change. But then I feel like okay, well, there's movies made about her, there's books about her. Everybody probably already heard about her, so okay, maybe not that, but it did get me thinking about food. So I I started looking around and I came out.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

I think I know what you're gonna say. Who no, go on, go on, go on. No, but you have to say it first now. I can't remember her name. But she does okay, go on.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

She was the first she was she was the first. Uh if it's the same person, I think it is, she was the first woman to have a cooking show on television. And she was Asian. That'd be kind of cool.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

Oh, you're talking about um Joy Joy Joy Chen? Yeah, yes, Joy Chen. So almost. So I did. So I I she was one of the you know top contenders of what I was going. By the way, super super fascinating. This is why I love doing this podcast because it kind of goes me, like puts me down rabbit holes of like discovering new things I never thought about. But she was a close one. I almost picked her, but then I found the story of Margaret Margaret Rutkin.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:47

Do you know who she is? Margaret Rudkin. So I, when I was little, because uh, so in our house, like we didn't have a lot of snacks and stuff like that. Like we're not a big snacking family, which is kind of funny because we're Asian. And if you go to an Asian grocery store, there's just aisles of just snacks, right? But we just didn't keep, we definitely didn't keep a lot of American snacks around, right? So there just wasn't a lot. So when you're a kid, you always want what you can't have, right? Of course. So of course you go to school and you have your lunchbox, and your lunchbox doesn't look like every other kid's lunchbox, and all the other kids have all this like peanut butter and jelly sandwich and all these things, and I'm just like over here drooling, right? But the one thing I love eating and I always saw other kids have was goldfish crackers. And even till this day, and like I don't eat as much now because you know, I'm sure it's not healthy for me, but I could sit there and snack on goldfish crackers all the time.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Oh my god, anybody could, especially the desk ones or whatever those cheddar.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Yes. So so the fact that she was the founder of Pepperidge Farm, I was like, okay, yeah, I have to figure out what her story is. Now, so I didn't know it went really far back. It was like in the 1930s, late 1930s, when she kind of got started. And the reason why it was called Pepperidge Farm is that that was what the the the the um the place that she owned with her family, that's what it was called. They just call it the house Pepperage Farm. It's like a quaint little house that they had in Fairfield, Connecticut. And she was a mother of three, and what happened was her youngest kid had severe allergies and asthma, and she wanted to be able to make him something that he can truly enjoy that was like wholesome and it didn't have a whole bunch of commercial additives and things like that. Now, don't forget, this is like pre-Julia Child, right? So at this era, well, I mean, she was alive, but she wasn't like famous yet, right? But in this era, like the common foods that were popular had a lot of, it's all like very quick stuff, right? Things you can like make really quickly. So it's there's a lot of additives and there's a lot of like it wasn't like a time where there was a lot of healthy fresh food around.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

What years are we talking? Are we talking 40s, 50s?

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Like early 40s. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the 40s especially.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was there were then a lot of things were not available to the yeah. A lot of the good stuff were not available because they were being used for war rations.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

Exactly. So just to kind of set the setting, so I mean, for us of this generation to understand what it's like to be in that era, and you're you're just trying to bake fresh bread for your family, and it's hard because it's just not there's not ingredients that are just readily around like we have today. Um, so uh the the interesting part is she's no baker by any means, like this is not her thing, but you know, she was obviously motivated because she wanted to do this for her kids. So she actually, through lots of trial and error, perfected a loaf of bread from stone ground whole wheat, milk, honey, and yeast. And apparently that was a revolutionary thing at that particular time in history. Um, and so she, you know, started the business kind of based off of that. And it quickly became a family affair because she got really popular. Um, and soon like her kitchen was already too small to actually kind of handle all the production that's involved. And the one thing I would say about her is that her and her husband made quite a team. So, you know, going back to the whole um thing you were talking about, just kind of power couples, like he was uh focused on pretty much like strategy and finance. And she was like everything else, operations and everything else, right? So one of the things she did is as soon as this this was going back in um back when she was starting, she convinced the bank to give her a $1,500 loan. So and this, I'm sure her her husband had sign-off on it, right? Oh, yeah. And of course, at that point, you know, anything in the food industry was very much male dominated. Um and she she really believed in the the bread that she had, which is what she started with. And so as it grew, um she she grew pretty quickly once she got the loan. And then her uh husband, her kids, and everybody had a pitch in, right? Because it's kind of like a family affair, a small business that she eventually kind of outgrew from her from her house. Um and then what she what she did was like the one thing that she was really good at was quality control, which I figured you would appreciate. Quality control because the fact that, you know, when you are trying to produce something as fresh as making bread, like, and you're trying to do it in big quantities, like quality control becomes the thing, right? Your whole marketing, your whole brand is based on freshness of what you're actually providing. So even though they started scaling, she made sure that there was never any compromises on the ingredient. And so she herself was the one that kind of took head of distributions and logistics to make sure that even though while she's expanding, all the bread that's being delivered are fresh. Smart, smart lady, I have to say.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

It's so funny because there used to be a there used to be a prep pepper farm store, strangely enough, around the corner from where I lived, and that's where I went to buy my bread.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

I feel like I've seen one before, and I've been to them a couple times when I was living in Richmond. Um, but then I don't know if they're around anymore. I just don't think I've got a lot of things. I don't think that they're anymore, but no, it was really random.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

It was in a in a in a shop like a shopping center, and like the grocery store was not far from it. Like I would go to the grocery store, but then I would go to Pepperge Farm to buy my bread.

SPEAKER_02 22:42

Yeah. Yeah. Well, now they have this whole extension line. I mean, like if you go to any kind of like uh grocery store now, like there's a whole bunch of pepperage farm types of cookies and all these things, right? So it's it's super cool just to think that at some point this was all done out of kind of a home kitchen.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

Um yeah, and she she was like super um diligent about how she grew the business and also how she interacted with her customers. For her, it was all about marketing, brand, and quality. And so, like, for example, for her customers, like she would make sure that she actually wrote little notes in the things that she delivered in her bread deliveries to each of her customers. And that's kind of how she kind of grew, just by word of mouth. And eventually, of course, they could do more marketing. But she, you know, also paid a lot of attention to like her customer feedback and she improved and expanded based on what she was hearing from her customers. Um, and so from that, she was able to not just expand in the US, but she eventually expanded outside of the US and she started introducing um a lot of European style cookies instead of just bread. And she kind of built like a production line out of that, which is kind of cool. Like she just like slow and steady, I guess, but it's not slow and steady. I think it was actually really, really fast how she ended up doing it. So um she started in 1937, so um in 1961, so it was only about 20 some years later, um, she ended up selling the family ended up selling Pepperage Farm to Campbell Soup Company for $28 million. Now, mind you, this is 1961. Right. So that's a few hundred million dollars today, a couple hundred million dollars today, probably, right? And then under that, you know, Campbell, of course, started really like pushing and expanding the line. So now this is the Pepperage Farm that we we know today, right? Like the cookies, the bread, the goldfish crackers. I love goldframe. I was jealous when I was in school. Now I know, now I'm craving it. I'm like, I should probably pick up some goldfish crackers. It's the best ever. Whoever thought of that, especially in the cheddar one.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

I know. I don't know a mother alive that would be able to get through their child's first three years without uh without goldfish crackers or or or Cheerios.

SPEAKER_02 24:59

I just remember the first time I had it, I was kind of like, man, I've never tasted anything like this. Like, because our you know Asian snacks just aren't infused with those kind of flavors, right? And then of course now like the Milano cookies and well Americans because I will eat the whole bag.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Yeah, yeah. Americans like the cheese. There's a lot of cheese, cheese-based snacks, and they love their they love their salt and they love their sweet. So there's a lot of sugary, a lot of sugar in the sugary snacks.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

Not in Asian culture or like snacking. Not in Armenian or Arab culture either. Um, most half of our population is lactose intolerant, so there goes the cheese part. I do like saltiness area and savory, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

Yeah.

unknown 25:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

I don't even know if what snack would I have ever eaten that wasn't was non-americ. Like, I don't think Armenians even really have snacks per se. I mean, we have meze. So I think meze.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

I think like in our culture, the reason why we have so many snacks, like when you go out shopping, isn't for like your household consumption. It's to have a rounds, and when you have guests over, you can lay out snacks. Oh, yeah. It's not for your kids. Like, I never grew up snacking.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Yeah. No, same thing. Same thing. I uh we only had meze, and like mesa only ever happened if people came over. So if I wanted something to eat, I would just pull out the cheese and cucumbers and pita bread, and that was my snack. Or red pepper paste and olives and pita bread.

SPEAKER_02 26:33

But well, I we definitely didn't have too much olives in our house. That was definitely pita bread and yeah, definitely very different types of snacks in my my house. I think our snack is like, oh, there's a bowl of fried rice in the fridge.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, if there's leftovers from yesterday, that's your snack.

unknown 26:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

But we didn't I didn't grow up snacking. Snacking is definitely a Western thing.

SPEAKER_02 26:59

It is, yeah. It was uh it was always something to look forward to, especially when I went to friends' house, right? Because you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

I mean, yeah, and I guess snacking is like it is also a European, I mean, they've got their tea time, they've got their afternoon teas, and they've got their high teas, so depending on how famished you are. But we didn't have that. We just have meze. But but the thing about like the way Armenians eat, which is also the way like I I would say, because we all like we all live together for thousands of years, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Armenians, the Assyrians, Turks, Arabs, like all of us, um food time can be three hours long. So you start with a meze and then you work your way to dinner, and then you work your way to coffee. Like, so food eating is like three or four hours long. So I guess you are kind of snacking into dinner.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

So you were just eating all day long.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

All day long, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

So yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

So um, before we move on to the raw truth, we want you to be a part of our conversation and let us know what you want to hear. Send us questions or comments to our email, the businessbehind small business at gmail.com, to ask questions related to our show or just let us know how much you love us. I I'd love to hear that more often. Uh, we want to give you what you want to learn about. So um we're gonna get into the raw truth where we each share our own gritty experience with today's topic. Um, I don't know that is gonna be so gritty, but um I do want to share a raw truth. Do you have a raw truth?

SPEAKER_02 28:49

Well, I didn't really know how it would be applicable to today. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

I know.

SPEAKER_02 28:55

So I didn't really come up with one. I kind of figured this was gonna take the place of raw truth plus like famous example, because in itself is a famous example.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Yeah, true. Well, I mean, I I I have a little bit more to to stretch, not stretch, but to give another layer about Lucille Ball and and all of all of the things. So so this episode wasn't just about talking to you all about a famous people pro famous persons and how successful they were. I mean at the root of it all, it's why we did choose this person and how did they inspire us. Mind you, there are not enough episodes to talk about all of the people that have influenced me or have influenced us. However, I'm so moved by Lucille Ball to think of how very little people know about her business acumen. I just felt like we should talk about that. And you with Pepperage Farm. I mean, I had no idea about it being like an actual Pepperidge Farm. Um everyone knowed her as a comedian or as an actress, but she was just so much more than that. I mean, I named a few of the shows that she was responsible for bringing to television, but there were a lot more that I know everyone has heard of. Uh, Lucille Ball had a very harsh childhood with very little love in it. She was surrounded by people who took advantage of her and just narcissistic people between her mom and her stepfather. Her cousin lived the kind of life she would have wanted to live, and instead of taking that and living a life of resentment, she paved her own path so that she could also have a happy life. She's a wonderful example of picking yourself up by the bootstrings and giving yourself what you want, as opposed to envying whatever went around you. Her life story resonated with me because I did not have an easy childhood and I also had to forge my own path in order to get the things that I wanted. It would have been so much simpler for me to be resentful and blame everyone around me for my current situation or my then current situation, but instead I decided this is not the life I should have, so I changed paths. And every time life put me in a situation I did not want to be in, that's what I did. I changed paths. Um Lucille Ball did the same thing, but so did Audrey Hepburn, Ruth Handler, Marjorie Merriweather host, Maya Angelou, and quite a few others who've influenced me heavily and shaped me into who I am today. No.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Excuse me.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

That's your reaction? No, I'm kidding. That was my reaction. Oh jeez. It's okay. I mean, anyway, so you know we're gonna move on to that.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

Yeah, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

I was gonna say that I was gonna say that, like, um, I think that uh I think it's always great to to keep people like this in mind, right? Because sometimes or a lot of times, I feel like when you when you run when you run a business and you you're starting it up and you're kind of a solo entrepreneur who maybe ended up hiring people and you're kind of building more of a company enterprise field, um, it's it's a lonely, lonely path, right? Like you're kind of doing it yourself, and it's just good to know that others have walked the same path, maybe with similar challenges that you face that you know that it can be done. Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:13

Absolutely. Uh I I'd like to think that it was not a coincidence that we chose women, both of us chose women.

SPEAKER_02 32:25

Well, you know, okay, so yeah, and I I don't think either you and I would label ourselves as a feminist.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

No. Or would we? No, I don't think so. I don't know. You can hesitate for a second. I was like, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

I have feminist tendencies. I think we all do, right? Like well, we are female. I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

So but I mean, I don't think we would label ourselves as what a um what a popular definition of feminist is, I guess that's the way to say it. Yeah, right. But you always admire and look up to those people who are like you. So I would say naturally we were gravitate toward women because, well, yeah, you know, that is true.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

That is true. I mean, I had still I had so many, I had so many more that I could have named off, but like those are the people that I mean you just gotta pay attention, right? You pay attention to the people around you that you admire, and honestly, pay attention to the people that you think are doing it wrong too, and make notes of the people that are doing it wrong so that you don't do it wrong as well. Uh and you know, so today, today with the famous example, we are um we are going to flip the script a little bit. So we already gave our famous example. Our famous examples were were already part of the episode. So I thought it would be great, not Tiffany. I don't know if you've you've got an example um that inspired you and inspired today's discussion, but I have real people. Um, so instead of famous example, I'm gonna do um no one knows this person example. And in each episode, we'd like to connect a famous example, but today we're not gonna do that. Um today I'm gonna do that.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

Today we're gonna connect in with the no one knows no one knows this example.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

Nobody else is gonna know this person.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

Um no, no, no, go right ahead. Um, just on a on a different note, though, on a very different note. And this is my bad because I got you talking in the beginning, though. I do need to scoot in like five, ten minutes.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

I'll talk fast.

SPEAKER_02 34:31

No, no, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So you I'm not gonna have an example, go right ahead.

SPEAKER_01 34:35

All you for the next 10 minutes, all you all right.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

I'm going to flip the script, like I said. Uh so today, uh, I think you've heard me talk. Today I'm gonna talk about somebody who inspired me and inspired this episode. I think if you heard me talk about a woman who worked for one of my uncles who taught me quite a bit about business and what it is to be a business owner. She was extremely influential to my life and gave me the foundation um of what I needed to do and to be and who to be in order to start a business and be successful in it. The funny thing is, is she probably didn't know that all of the advice she gave me sunk in very deep into my brain. Likely she was sharing with me advice that other people were probably not taking, because I do that a lot. I'll I'll talk to my dogs or I'll talk to my kids about things that they're they're not listening to me. And she probably thought I wasn't listening, but I was. Many of the systems that I currently have, the processes that I have and the core of who I am as a business person, it came from her and her advice. Uh, another person that was extremely influential, whether or not he knew it, was my uncle. And I know that I need to narrow this down because most of my family on both sides own a business. So this is my father's older brother. Uh he came to this country with very little and he actually left Lebanon with very little. So it's not like he had any real seed money to start uh business, but he opened up a body shop in Alexandria. He knew very little of the language, had no real formal education, and frankly, he really didn't know a whole lot about the business either. But he managed to create not only a multimillion dollar company, but it was also, or it also became multi-generational company. Mind you, he was an extremely shrewd businessman and not everyone's favorite person, but when it comes to the kind of business he was in and from the background that he came from, you really couldn't expect him to be nice. My dad, who worked for him, used to take me into work sometimes, and I would just watch my uncle and the conversations he would have with people. And I I was still remember them very clearly to this day, and he probably had no idea that I was paying attention, but I was. His sons took over from there, and it's now toward working towards being handed to the third generation. So um that's amazing. You know, I learned a lot from quite a few members of my family who had long-term businesses, unbeknownst to them, and of course from the manager of one of my uncle's businesses. She was hilarious, she was an awesome woman, and because of her, I also knew a little bit of Yiddish.

SPEAKER_02 36:59

So well, that's quite a uh quite an experience.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

Yeah, right. Okay, so do you have any uh apps, recommendations, books? Because if you don't, I do. Of course you do.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

Uh no, not not on not on today's topics though, but I I do find fascinating. I I just would say that I always find inspiration in like biographies or memoirs of people that I look up to. And I do pick it up and read it. And um read most recently I've been reading a lot of Julia Childs again. Um, just you know, in times where things get a little challenging and a little tough. So yeah, you know, whoever your per your person is, you know, um take a take a look through, take a look through. I'm sure somebody has written something about them.

SPEAKER_00 37:43

Well, you know what? I'm gonna give a few examples of uh places in which you could go to where I bet you you're gonna find um the person that you admire, you're probably gonna find them here. So uh first I'm going to say that there are two great movies available that greatly encompass how influential and powerful Lucy and Desi were. One of them is the movie Being the Ricardos with Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. If you can get past seeing Nicole Kidman as Lucy O'Ball, you'll see that this movie really, really tunes into how great they were as business partners. Also on Amazon Prime is a fabulous documentary called Lucy and Desi. Uh this is this was produced by Amy Poehler, and she also um she also narrates it. Uh, she gives an inside look into the couple's business, their love story, and a lot of great background. I've watched it, it's fantastic. Um, who they were as individuals and as a couple. Uh I also recommend a couple of books as well. For example, American Empress, The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post by Nancy Rubin Stewart and Dream Doll, the Ruth Handler story. And this was written by Ruth Handler and Jacqueline Shannon. I also highly recommend you listen to the podcast The History Chicks, which is where I had heard all about all three of these women's life stories for the first time. And that's what started my trip down the rabbit hole. I knew some things, but not as much as these two ladies share. Go ahead and take a listen to their other episodes because if you're like me and you love to hear history, they um everyone they uh every uh person that they talk about is going to be a woman. Uh so if you're looking at uh other businesses, I really, really like the business wars. Um that's a fabulous podcast as well about um great businesses and history. Uh lastly, we're going to share some links as well in our show notes for you to also take a deep dive into Lucio Ball. So yeah. So please join us for our next episode where we will discuss five accounting mistakes that could cost you your business. We'll probably talk about more than five, but I just capped it at five. Stay tuned. Please show us your support by following us on your preferred podcast platform. Say that three times fast. Social media and YouTube. We'd love for you to also share our episodes. And hey, we've also got YouTube Shorts now. So and find us on TikTok. I'm everywhere. We're everywhere. Yeah. All of our links are posted below. And until next time, mind the business behind your business because all great successes start small. Until next time.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

Bye.