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Lesson #2: Passion is the Key in a Successful Business Recipe
Article Overview: “You have to have passion when you’re finding a recipe for a career,” says Fields. “If you love what you are doing, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
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Free Download - Debbi Fields Quotes By Debbi Fields |
Lesson #2: Passion is the Key in a Successful Business Recipe
“You have to have passion when you’re finding a recipe for a career,” says Fields. “If you love what you are doing, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Fields’ parents might not have been supportive of her future business efforts, but when she was still a young girl her father gave her some wise words of advice: “Debbi, whatever you do in your life, you’ve got to find something that you absolutely, passionately love.” And what did Fields love doing more than anything else? She thought about it for just a second before she realized what it was. Fields loved to bake chocolate chip cookies. She always had and knew she always would.
“I loved it,” she says. “And I sat there and I thought, ‘You know, I’m good at it. I’m really good at it.” Fields loved the fact that when she shared her cookies with people, she could give them an enjoyable experience. “I could make people smile,” she says. “All they had to do is eat the cookie. That was a magical thing.” Fields knew in an instant that she was getting herself into the right business. In fact, she never even considered it a business. It was simply what she calls, “an extension of me.”
It was that passion that finally convinced a banker to come on board in backing her venture. Fields had approached scores of bankers with her business plan but was turned down by all of them. Finally, she found one who saw something in her business idea that went beyond the cookies. Fields made her presentation, gave the banker her business plan, and let him sample her cookies. “Debbi,” he said, “I absolutely love your product. I think your cookies are great. And I absolutely love your passion.”
In growing her business, Fields was determined to bring on board only those people who shared her passion for cookies. To make sure she was hiring people who were going to love their jobs as much as she did, Fields began auditioning all of her employees. People who wanted to work for Mrs. Fields were not just going to sit through the regular interview process.
Fields would first make them try her cookies. “The reason I wanted to find out about what they thought about the cookies was because if they would take a bit and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I love these,’ I knew I would never have to teach them how to sell,” says Fields, “because if it came from the heart, that was passion, that was love, and that was something I never had to teach them.” Needless to say, the girl who refused a cookie for fear of developing acne did not get the job.
Fields would then send her prospects into the street with trays of cookies, and told them that if any customers came into the store mentioning their name, they would be hired. Fields knew that those people who were uncomfortable out in public with their trays would never convey the passion they needed to sell her product.
Finally, Fields would make her prospects sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her in the middle of the store. “That’s how I found the best cookie people in the world,” says Fields, “because if they would sing and belt out ‘Happy Birthday,’ I knew that smiles were going to be created, laughter, fun times; and we were going to have a relationship.” Her formula was a success, and as a result, Fields never wrote a customer service manual “because customer service comes from the heart.”
Recipes for Success
Recipe for a Great Life
Thinking In and Out of the Box
Frappuccino Recipe
LEADER REDEFINE SUCCESS.
Related Forum Posts
Books for Women Entrepreneurs
- There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here.
It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new.
In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment!
1. The Old Girl's Network
2. Mother's Work
3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women
4. Pitch Like A Girl
5. Workplace Warrior
6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer
7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery
8. She Wins, You Win
9. Napoleon On Project Management
10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do
11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years
12. The One Minute Millionaire
13. Talking From 9 to 5
14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions
15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success
16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded
17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful
18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End
19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide
20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen
21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business
22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker
23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business
24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises
25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy
26. The Promotable Woman
27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it
28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home
29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Dan Kennedy Marketing Methods
- We haven't sent out the physical letter yet as the person owning the list wanted to make modifications to the letter that we knew would work well but the List owner had a point - it didn't reflect her personality so her clients would know it didn't come from her.
Lesson learned for me. We're back to the drawing board with the list owner more involved in the development of the letter and emails.
I should have known better being a Business Analyst in my day job that you never leave the end-user out.
So Evan we haven't had the opportunity to test any of it yet but it's been a fun process for me to stand back and look at.
My entry
- 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read
- this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody.
2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto.
3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book
Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Re: What's 1 word to describe what your business will be in 2012
- Successful.
The 7 Greatest Truths about Successful Women
- Picked up a few books on my weekly trip to the library, thought I'd share their tables of contents.
The 7 Greatest Truths about Successful Women: How You Can Achieve Financial Independence, Professional Freedom, and Personal Joy, by Marion Luna Brem.
From the inside cover: In 1984, battling both cervical and breast cancer, and facing $500,000 in medical bills and a disintegrating marriage, Marion Luna Brem was desperate to find a way to support herself and her two young sons. With more than a few strikes against her, she started knocking on doors, looking for a job. Seventeen doors later, the blunt speaking manager of a car dealership in central TExas declared, "I've been thinking of hiring a broad." And with that invitation, Marion took her own first step on the road to financial independence, yada yada yada
Today, this "broad" owns two automobile dealerships, an advertising agency, and a stake in a local bank. She sits on the boards of several businesses, etc. etc.
1. Who Wants to be her own boss?
2. Ladies, Start your engines
3. Resiliency
4. Nurturing
5. Intuition
6. Creativity
7. Passion
8. Self-Value
9. Sensitivity
10. Leadership
11. Balance
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