|  Most
–indeed almost every financial advisor/wealth maker suggests
that the road to riches is paved by paying off debt. Not Loral Langemeier.
She suggests investing deeply in a myriad of businesses that you
know well to amass a fortune and then pay down the debt. Following
her own advice has made Langemeier a millionaire many times over—and
a pipeline telling others how to do it.
As author of The Millionaire Maker (2006, McGraw-Hill) and director
of Live Out Loud, a financial coaching and mentoring company founded
in 2000, Langemeier has built a platform as a business and financial
speaker. Her agenda: help audiences go out on their own armed with
the knowledge and team to support their money-making ventures.
In 2004, Langemeier wrote Guerrilla Wealth, with Jay Conrad Levinson,
whose series was published in 39 languages and has sold over 14
million copies. As a result, she launched Team Made Millionaire,
an international seminar focusing on building financial independence
through teamwork. Additional Live Out Loud programs and tools, such
as Big Table workshops, Teleseminars, and supplemental wealth building
CD/DVD sets and workbooks, offer additional guidance and support
throughout the wealth-building process.
A predetermined path
Langemeier claims she knew from the time she was seven that she
had a predetermined path in life, and a decade later understood
that it was to educate people. Ten years after that she knew she
would change lives teaching about money and began to do so in earnest.
Growing up in a large German family in Nebraska, the second oldest
of five, Langemeier had neither money nor connections. Her father
farmed and her mother ran a catering company. But she did have an
Aunt Bev, a teacher who at an early age showed Langemeier that there
was life outside of Nebraska. She named her Big Table mentoring
program after Aunt Bev’s slide show of her travels on the
big table.
And she had an entrepreneurial spirit. She had a mowing company
at age 12, and a personal training business at 17. The Langemeier
children were taught to work hard and be involved. Langemeier
was in basketball, softball, volleyball, track, French horn, drums,
piano, 4-H, drama, and skiing. (Today, living three blocks from
the lift in Tahoe, she’s an active competitive skier. Her
30-person team is based in San Rafael, CA, and she gets there
regularly.)
“I was always a learner and instead of learning “No,”
I learned “Next,” she says.
Out from behind the desk
After attending the University of Nebraska and Nebraska Wesleyan,
she earned a degree in finance and physical education in 1987 and
after a short stint at Union Bank and Trust, where she’d interned
through college while simultaneously instructing aerobics, she determined
that she couldn’t bear sitting behind a desk. So she took
off for Ken Cooper’s corporate wellness clinic in Dallas,
and six months later returned to Nebraska to launch a wellness program
for the bank.
Her big exit from Nebraska occurred when she was 24. Chevron hired
her to create fitness centers on its offshore oilrigs. “Do
you think you can do this?” they asked her. “Absolutely,
I can,” she replied, unaware of what an oilrig was. For three
years, based in New Orleans, she spent most of the week aboard the
rigs. Then Chevron transferred her to its corporate headquarters
in San Francisco. In 1993, while coaching and training the oil giant’s
employees, she got a Master’s Degree in Human Development
and Human Behavior.
Around this time she met Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Dad
Poor Dad series. She recognized that he was the bridge to take her
from the health world to the wealth world. “It’s an
obvious transition dealing with human behavior: dieting is related
to financial discipline and the desire for what you want,”
she says. For five years she outsourced her Chevron duties and was
a coach, facilitator, trainer and distributor for the Rich Dad series,
and simultaneously added a dozen other wealth-builder speakers to
represent. When she felt she really knew the industry, in 2002,
she launched Live Out Loud, coaching and mentoring one-by-one programs.
Part of a team
Now, Langemeier is a chronic investor, who, with different field
partners and teams nationwide owns such assets as 70 houses in Arkansas
and a slew in 28 other states. Hew sweet spot: the $40,000 home
from which she can generate a few hundred dollars a month of cash
flow. While inventory bobs around 1,000 doors, she is constantly
buying and selling, so the number is dynamic. While Langemeier’s
partners on the ground find the properties, she structures the business
and legal entity.
Her “immediate” or core team numbers more than 160—and
each has his or her own team. Typically these field partners were
once her pupils. During the coaching they fell in love. “We’re
the only company that can say all our coaches are millionaires,”
she says. The biggest problem most people have is that they try
to do it alone,” adds Langemeier. “I always function
as part of a team.”
 Or
part of many teams. Langemeier, who moves at warp speed, estimates
that she’s now running 20 businesses. The latest: a tabletop
company that was running inefficiently. With 18 partners she’s
planning on turning it around. “I can do the day to day running
but it’s the strategic planning that I love,” she says.
“And as my T-shirt says...‘Do Paperwork Or Be Poor,’
so I do it,” she says.
“The joy for me is watching people change their entire lives.
Making money is just a byproduct,” says Langemeier. While
she relies on intuition, she has learned to back that up with background
checks and screenings. Two years ago she didn’t create sufficiently
strong contracts and was taken to the cleaners by two guys she trusted.
Her unconventional advice is mirrored in her unconventional personal
life. Six years ago she had her son, Logan, solo. While he is her
greatest joy and “perspectives teacher,” he was also
the impetus for her to turn on the money-making machine. “Too
many single moms make excuses about their finances. They play to
“Not Lose” rather than play to win,” she says.
She has also taken her wealth-building advice to heart at home:
“It takes a tribe to raise a kid so I’ve built a strong
nanny network,” she says. Logan often travels with her. The
other night, when she landed on Boardwalk playing Monopoly, he suggested
they joint venture buying it. Langemeier admits she’d like
another child, but this time with a partner.
She’d also like to grow her Live Out Loud, Inc business into
a $50 m educational company, build an investment firm of $1 billion
under management and create many more millionaires. There’s
a major paradigm shift that’s necessary for someone to become
a millionaire and that’s for people to see themselves living
a different, bigger life, she says. “God doesn’t deliver
to chaos, so you better have a clear plan for your wealth.”
And before you can even have the clear plan, you have to have a
clear sense of who you want to become in it, she says.
Four months after Gina Boswell joined Avon in 2003 as
Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Business Development,
she became a stealth Avon representative. Joining the ranks of the
4.9 million independent sales reps gave her an opportunity to see
the corporation’s innards and to “completely understand
the experience end to end.”
It also gave Avon the impetus to alter how it recruits, trains
and develops its rep force, and fine tune both the customers’
ordering and delivery experience. As a result, there are fewer product
launches and considerably more online fulfillment, she says. (Her
commissions went to Avon’s Breast Cancer charity walk, in
which Boswell also participated.)
Participation has long been a Boswell bylaw enacted before she
was responsible for Avon’s growth strategies, when she worked
at Estee Lauder Companies and Ford Motor Co. It remains important
in her newest post, as Senior Vice President & Chief Operating
Officer North America of Avon and a member of the $7.7 billion (in
annual revenues) company’s Operating Council, which she has
held since February 2005.
At Ford from 1999 through 2003, she rose through the ranks to head
the automaker’s global enterprise business strategy and was
integral in developing its revitalization plan. Earlier, she’d
led Ford’s e-business, and established marketing partnerships
and alliances such as FordDirect.com. For seven years before joining
Ford, she played a key role in bringing Lauder public in 1995 and
headed its investor relations and new business development, which
involved acquiring both Aveda and Jane and establishing marketing
alliances with Donna Karan and others.
Being part of the team that took Lauder to the public markets was
a career highpoint. “What a great story we had to tell, of
a woman with a dream,” says Boswell. Aside from an immersion
into a months-long intensive process with the investment community,
what she learned from this experience was that it is possible to
turn a business started in one woman’s home into one of the
largest companies in its given sector. She also learned that “if
you have conviction in a business idea, by developing and executing
the right strategy you can achieve great success with it,”
she says.
Trained to Be Heard
Boswell grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, the only girl among
four siblings. Her parents were traditional first generation Italian-Americans
and part of a sprawling network. (She has 25 first cousins). Her
father was an accountant and her mother worked as a telephone operator
when the youngest went to school. Everyone played an instrument
and was disciplined and dedicated to whatever they were involved
with, she recalls. In addition to the discipline and dedication
she learned here, Boswell watched how her mother influenced thinking
in subtle but powerful ways and learned that “people adopting
your ideas is more important than claiming credit.” Simultaneously,
dealing with three brothers prepared her “to make sure my
voice was heard” in competitive situations.
After Boswell graduated from an all-girl high school, she attended
Boston University on an academic scholarship and graduated summa
cum laude. Several years later she returned to New Haven to earn
a Master’s degree from the Yale School of Management. Before
that, though, while at BU she had a part-time work-study job running
a small department at the Comptroller’s Office. Her boss pleaded
with her to stay on. And at 19, she lived in Cork, Ireland, for
three months as part of a college-sponsored program allowing international
work opportunities. It was her first overseas venture. (Last year
she was in China five times and there’s nary a country she
hasn’t visited in her career.)
After school and having earned a CPA, Boswell became an engagement
manager for Marakon Associates and Arthur Andersen & Co. Leaving
management consulting to join a company that actually “made
things” was a huge turning point. “I got great satisfaction
from implementing instead of merely developing strategies, and witnessing
the impact these strategies had on the company and its people,’’
she said.
Reaching People Wherever They Are
 As
COO, Boswell aims to restore profitable growth in the mature market
of the US where the intensity of competition is at unprecedented
levels. To achieve that, Avon must undergo some transformation,
which, she anticipates, will not be easy. “Ding-dong is the
old Avon,” she says. The new one is reaching customers wherever
they are. Direct selling is as relevant as ever, and Avon’s
woman-to-woman connection relationship-based model is very contemporary,
she says. In her first role without wide global responsibilities—only
North America—she said she is able to go deeper and get more
experience in the direct selling and with brands. As the world’s
leading direct seller of beauty and related products, Avon’s
product lines include such recognizable brand names as Avon Color,
Anew, Skin-So-Soft, Advance Techniques Hair Care, Avon Naturals,
Mark and Avon Wellness.
A typical day starts with a 40-minute train commute from Rye into
Manhattan. From 8:30 to around 9:30 she deals with on average 70
e-mails and 10 voicemails, and prioritizes her time. (There’s
a constant need to re-prioritize, she says.)
Then she and her assistant review the calendar to identify meeting
requirements and conflicts. On most days she attends four hour-long
meetings on everything from strategy decisions to human resources
to financial investments. Less than a third of her time is spent
on the road, visiting Avon plants and distribution centers, district
sales managers, other business leaders and Avon reps. Most nights
she’s home by 7:30, catching up with her seven- and 10-year-old
daughters and husband of 13 years who heads sales for a steel company
and is a ideal partner. Boswell helps it to work by “trying
to never take myself too seriously” and “leaving my
dancing shoes at the door when I come home.”
Adaptable and Guilt Free
“Making sure I’m a good role model for my girls is
very important to me,” says Boswell. But even with careful
organization and planning, there are compromises every working mother
sometimes makes. “Some days the family loses, and other days
the company loses. But they’re never the most important times.
As I age I recognize how rare and fragile being able to pursue a
solid full-time career without interruption, while being an available
mom and wife to another equally busy senior executive is, and I
don’t take it for granted. At the same time, I am relatively
guilt free.”
Guilt would be a burden and Boswell has been able to soar by shedding
impediments, or turning them into benefits. “Coming from a
varied family mix of white collar and blue collar backgrounds—and
of both starving musicians and thriving business people—I
learned to easily adapt to many different environments, whether
factory floor or ivory tower, male or female-dominated, consensus
or autocratic management styles, entrepreneur or long-time employee,”
she says.
Although Boswell credits much of her success to good fortune and
even better mentors, she concedes that aside from her adaptability
she is an excellent listener, well organized with clearly defined
goals, a good delegater and has an innate need to achieve. “I’ve
always thrived on feeling a sense of accomplishment,” she
says. She also thrives when surrounded by great people, and “when
good processes deliver great outcomes, where everyone wins.”
She loves seeing how Avon promotes the empowerment of women around
the world.]
Avon Products, Inc., Celebrates Its 120th Anniversary
It’s unlikely start came in 1886 when door-to-door
bookseller David Hall McConnell observed that his women customers
were more interested in the perfume samples he used to get
his foot in the door, than the literature he was peddling.
He had been looking for a better business opportunity and
this, he felt, was it.
The product line began with simple floral fragrances and blossomed
into shampoo creams and toothpowders, along with pantry items
like olive oil and baking powder—things that would be
consumed quickly and replaced.
Hygiene and personal grooming was a private matter and McConnell
reasoned having women approach women in the comfort of their
homes made good business sense. He was also sympathetic to
the limited employment opportunities for women of this period.
Immediately he began recruiting women and only women for
his sales force. Hiring women was “heretical”
for the time,” remarked Andrea Jung, Avon’s chairman
and chief executive officer, the first woman to hold the top
spot at the company and one of only eight female Fortune 500
CEOs today.
Avon executives proudly say the company empowered U.S. women
socially and financially 34 years before they had the right
to vote.
The very first Avon lady—Persis Foster Eames Albee
of Winchester, N.H.—had been selling books for McConnell.
The Sunday school teacher, wife and mother of two, was 50-years-old
when she started her job as a beauty consultant.
In recent years Albee has been elevated to icon status at
Avon. Top sales representatives are presented with statutes
in her likeness, and these have become popular collectibles—even
bought and sold on eBay.
It is estimated more than 40 million women have sold Avon
since the company’s founding. The brand is ubiquitous.
Currently, 86 percent of all U.S. women have purchased an
Avon product in their lifetime.
Meanwhile, Avon’s international footprint has grown
larger and larger, now representing 70 percent of the company’s
sales. It is the largest direct selling company in the world
with revenues approaching $8 billion and 5 million representatives
in 143 markets.
Avon’s saga hasn’t been seamless. There were
hostile takeover attempts in the 1980s by both Mary Kay and
Amway. Avon management had become uncertain about the future
of direct selling and steered the company into health care
businesses. These operations quickly took a downturn and saddled
the company with debt, making it an easy target.
But from the start Avon imparted a family-feel to the organization
and its associates took on the fight. A group of employees
from its Atlanta distribution center dug into their own pockets
and presented management with a $30,475 check to help pay
expenses. In a particularly nasty feud with Amway, thousands
of Avon representatives sent letters to Amway protesting a
merger. A direct selling company with unhappy representatives
is worthless.
Avon eventually rebounded and spent the next decade burnishing
its image with upgraded packaging and new advertising messages.
It also launched a breakthrough product in 1992 with Anew
Perfecting Complex for Face, the first alpha hydroxy acid
skin cream in the mass market. It helped trigger today’s
flourishing anti-age market.
The company sells more than $1 billion of fragrance a year
and nearly an equal amount of jewelry. An Avon lipstick is
purchased every three seconds. But to hear management speak,
Avon’s mission is not to be the best beauty brand around,
although it does want to be that too.
The company has a “socio-economic purpose for women,”
according to Jung. She said Avon’s role is to learn
and understand the needs of women and offer products and services
that fulfill those needs. “Avon has got a social purpose
as well as a commercial purpose to changing women’s
lives.”
As part of this, Avon has taken up the cause of breast cancer—raising
more than $400 million to-date to fund research and education
programs —and recently added the issue of domestic violence.
Today, Avon is once again planning for the future. After
five years of double digit growth, sales in 2005 came in lower
than expected. Late last year Jung announced a restructuring
initiative intended to restore growth to previous levels by
shaving expenses, increasing advertising and placing renewed
effort on product innovation.
Abridged from “Avon: Building the World’s
Premier Company for Women” by Laura Klepacki. Published
by John Wiley & Sons (Hardcover April 2005/ Paperback
June 2006).
|
No
question traditional advertising is under attack with TV watchers
fast forwarding through commercials, and marketers looking to stealthily
place products in the actual shows. Susan Credle, Executive Vice
President-Executive Creative Director of BBDO New York, has a solution.
Make the ads so great that people tune in for them everyday, as
they do for the Super Bowl. “We talk about how to put our
brand in entertainment: why can’t we just make our brands
more entertaining?”
 This
she has done since 1992, leading BBDO’s creative development
on M&M/Mars and shepherding the ubiquitous M&M spokescandy
campaign to become part of global pop culture.
Credle also worked on well known campaigns for Armstrong, FedEx,
Visa and Pepsi and was part of the creative effort to land Cingular
Wireless and put it on the map with a 2001 Super Bowl spot that
turned it into a recognized cellular force virtually overnight when
Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless in 2004. She recently helped
win the $300 million Lowe’s home improvement business.
And she never really expected to land in advertising. Her first
love was the theater. She danced and acted her way through high
school and with friends was always putting on a show. She was born
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1963.Credle’s parents separated
by the time she was six. Her mother, who taught middle school, while
her father attended medical school, took her and her little brother
back to Greenville, South Carolina, to live with her parents before
eventually moving into a small home of their own. She saw her dad
in the summer for a week or two and every other holiday. Divorce
was rare in 1971, and she recalls her younger brother telling someone
that their dad had died because it was just easier.
Her mother taught English in a small, parochial school where Credle
received an expensive education for free. Most of her friend’s
parents were business and community leaders. She grew up amidst
many CEOs whom she knew as Lea’s or Lynn’s dad. When
she moved to the Big Apple, she felt very comfortable approaching
top people because they reminded her of somebody’s dad.
Christ Church Episcopal School (where she stayed from third grade
until graduating in 1981) was a secure, familial environment that
changed and grew and developed during her decade there. So did Credle.
“It was exciting and I realized you could grow without constantly
removing around. Perhaps that’s why I’ve remained at
BBDO for 20 years,” she says.
After high school, she attended the University of North Carolina,
and after a super fast four years, armed with a journalism degree
and “a pitiful excuse for a portfolio,” hopped a $29
People’s Express plane ride to New York City. It was 1985
and BBDO was agency of the year, so that’s where she applied
—to give the agency’s receptionists their bathroom breaks
for $11,500 a year. To supplement her lifestyle she taught aerobics
and coat-checked for free workouts and food.
“My advertising career had nowhere to go but up,” acknowledged
Credle. And up it went. By 1987 she was a junior copywriter. By
1989, a full-fledged (nothing junior about her) copywriter. She
was quickly promoted to associate creative director, became a elected
VP in 1994 and then senior VP in 1996. In 1998 she was promoted
to creative director and Executive Creative Director in 2005.
Her big break came in 1995 when, as a young creative, she was handed
the M&M’s business to co-run. The client’s then
marketing director, Paul Michaels (now CEO Worldwide of parent Masterfoods),
was new, daring, challenging, fearless and ready to change things,
she says. Credle was part of all that shakeup and benefited by his
belief in her, a belief that resulted in the recreation of the M&M’s
characters.
Acting helped prepared her for advertising. “Understanding
and getting into a character is a lot like getting to know a target
audience,” says Credle. “You become them and understand
how they think, what moves them, how they respond.” And to
act, she says, you must understand the arc of a story and learn
how to keep the audience’s attention, all, important to advertising.
Dance and theater also helped develop her sense of timing and how
to accentuate the right beat. Fortunately for her advertising allows
her to perform occasionally to the small, private audience of my
clients.
Credle loves the atypicality of advertising. But when in town,
she starts her day languidly. She arrives at the office around 10
AM after digesting the NY Times and Wall Street Journal and then
plunges into meetings with colleagues about creative on different
brands. Discussions range from strategy to creative ideas to the
execution itself. She rarely leaves the office before 7 PM but it’s
more likely to be later and if they are busy, dinner at 10 PM becomes
the norm.
She also loves working with really talented, smart, witty, competitive,
insightful, quick, resilient people who are the lifeblood of her
industry, and how varied the job is with both a business side, and
an artful side and every client bringing a completely different
experience. But the dark side is the ever-present pressure. When
you realize you have the power to turn a blank piece of paper into,
say, $1 million worth of revenue, you’re going to feel some
pressure,” she says, subjectivity and opinions contradicting
each other.
“Sometimes it’s hard to understand why things succeed
and fail,” a truism she says has always haunted advertising.
And it’s hard to keep colleagues above her excited about the
work as well as colleagues who report to her, clients, consumers
and awards-show judges. When different ideas excite different factions,
who to serve: she says. Her answer: the brand.
 Nonetheless,
she hates to let people down and considers avoiding that her greatest
motivator. “If I don’t do my job well, people who work
with me will be let down. Clients will be let down.
Management will be let down. I can’t stand that feeling of
being the one who didn1t come through,” she says. At the same
time, she savors “the huge rush from saving the day.”
While she’s never been in therapy, Credle suspects that impulse
derives from her dad leaving them when she was five.
Credle has no children, lives far from my siblings and parents
but family is “the one thing that would devastate” her
to lose. Her husband of 16 years was the first boy she ever met.
When she re-met him at 24, his mom had home videos of him at four
holding her at age two. They tried everything to have children for
eight years – before her stay-at-home architect husband became
an on-the-road architect and their lives became too busy to adopt.
“I’ve learned that I’m not in control of the journey,”
she says. The silver lining though is that she has had time to focus
and give more than people who have immediate families to tend to
on a daily basis.
Both her parents have been married three times, yet they all remain
close and along with her grandparents have been enormously influential
on her. When making major decisions, she thinks would they be proud
of how she handled something and approve of what she was doing.
“They are my conscience,” she says.
Credle views her day-to-day life like an amusement park ride. When
things come to an end it will be like getting off a great ride,”
she says. “Sorry it’s over. Glad I did it. Now where’s
the next cool ride I want to get on?”
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