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If you’ve ever thought about working from home or starting a home-based business, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with Carrie Wilkerson, also known as the Barefoot Executive. The Barefoot Executive is a website, community and bestselling book that she created to help work at-home professionals.
The site quickly grew into an empire with tens of thousands of subscribers, leading her to become a sought-after speaker and sales trainer. While she built multiple businesses from home over the past 19 years, she was also raising four children, getting out of six figures of debt and losing more than 100 pounds. Named Internet Marketer of the Year in 2009, Wilkerson has been featured on Forbes.com and Fox Business News and has worked with clients such as Google, John C. Maxwell, Zig Ziglar and more.
Clearly, she has a lot to teach us about success, so I visited her Texas home recently to ask how she built her powerful brand and how other entrepreneurs can build a successful empire from home.
1. Look for a need in your closest market.
Wilkerson got her entrepreneurial start at a direct sales company, but soon realized she could have a separate business offering a service to her fellow independent consultants. She began by asking those she knew if they could use an email newsletter. Eventually, she was making newsletters for 200 clients — and that was with consultants from just one direct sales company.
“I started my business like everybody does — with just who I knew. I sent out an email, I worked with one client for free for two months to get my systems down, my processes done in exchange for her recommendation and her referrals,” Wilkerson explains. “And it literally was like … you tell two friends, and she tells two friends, and she tells two friends. So we grew by referral very rapidly. At one point, we were growing by 10 to 12 clients a day.”
Consider your current immediate community of fellow moms, marketers, engineers, whatever — what is a need they have? Wilkerson says you don’t start an empire, you start with who you know and “grow into it.”
2. Truly commit.
Entrepreneurs are not known for patience. Sometimes, in an effort to move fast and wear many hats, they struggle with focus — and focus is a key component in the stories of the successful people I interview. Wilkerson’s life changed when she committed to going all-in on her new service business for three months.
“[My husband said,] ‘Just give it a good Carrie Try for two to three months before you give up.’ And I think as entrepreneurial-wired people, we sometimes want it to work right now or not at all,” she says. “At the end of three months, he was exactly right. We had [approximately] 70 clients on a recurring basis already by then, and we knew we were on to something.”
Most entrepreneurial people are creative, resourceful and efficient…