Or expand your office. For those who constantly find new ways to continue on the journey. Msnbc proudly presents your business on msnbc. Hi, everyone. Im jj ramberg and welcome to your business the show dedicated to helping your Small Business grow. Never, never, never give up is a quote famously attributed to winston churchill. And its an adage most entrepreneurs understand. Especially when things just dont seem to be working in their business. It took five years before the company teachers pay temperat e temperaturtemperature teachers got traction and there were so many times they could have given up but they didnt. Now the business has 4 million active users and teachers who sell materials on the site have earned 200 million. 200 million. This for a company that took five years with no traction. Not bad for a company that almost didnt make it. Kindergarten teacher deanna jump is something of a rock star. All these teachers are coming up wanting their picture with me. Im still not used to it and hope i never get used to it. Shes a selfmade millionaire. The first of teachers who hit the jackpot on the educational website called teachers pay teachers. Similar to etsy, this pier to pier marketplace makes it easy for teachers to sell classroom resources that they develop like lesson plans to other teachers. I was the first one to hit the milestone and was honored to be the first one. And to be able to pave the way for others so to speak. That was back in 2012. Not only was it a milestone for deanna jump but also for teachers pay teachers. We saw a group of teachers really adopt the platform. One of them was deanna jump, a tremendous teacher and inspiring educator. And they got teachers excited about what was going on on the platform. From that point on tpt was how to keep up with fast growth. Fast growth was the last thing paul had to worry about when he started the company back in 2006. He launched the business to connect and support the Education Community by allowing teachers to share the innovative materials they were creating for their classrooms, like lesson plans, interact ty notebooks and games. That allows us to different versions of the reading of the three little pigs. While everyone agreed that teachers pay teachers or tpt was a great idea, the journey was slow. The three ps, patient, perseverance and persistence. What is interesting about tpt to me is it feels like a tenyear long overnight success story. Thats right. Its the classic overnight success five to ten years later. I think what happens is if you talk to teachers, they almost always know about it. But people outside the teaching profession dont and the companies kind of live under the radar. Its a place teachers came to get help. Its really been hard to be a teacher but harder now than ever. So tpt is a place to come, get inspiration, find great resources, talk to other teachers, share some of the ideas, the trials and tribulations of being a teacher today and that field will grow. With almost 4 million active users, two out of every three teachers have downloaded something from the site. And while its no secret that teachers are notoriously overworked and underpaid, tpt became a place to escape that by getting help, support and ideas for their classrooms with the potential of making extra money themselves if they sold their resources on the site. The typical journey for someone who comes to tpt is they start down loading for free. When they find a teacher they connect with they start to buy. So from the perspective of the teachers selling, thats a double good. They make some money, they get recognition for the work theyve done and also get to know they are having a real impact in classrooms. Because it is important to remember if youre a teacherpreneur on tpt, youre a teacher first, an entrepreneur second. Two of the most successful teacherpreneurs are working beyond wheres my party people . There we go. At the conference, this all helps to grow the tpt community. We looked at each other and said, we have to start a conference. Within an hour, we had the logo, get your teach on logo, the sessions worked out. Thats what i love about the teachers pay teachers business, if you want to do it, do it. If you want to go for it, go for it. Hope is a teacher at the academy in atlanta, georgia. She has a blog called elementary shenanigans and a successful story on the teachers pay teachers site. If i really want teachers to take what they are learning here and impact their classroom through engagement, i have to show them what engagement looks like. So thats what im doing, songs, cheers and chants, handson learning because i cant just show teachers heres what you do, they have to experience it, too, because that motivates them and inspires them and that will impact their classrooms. If you look closely, youll see adam freed in the audience here taking notes, asking questions and engaging with this group. Part social, part educational, part technical and part entrepreneurial, tpt makes sure all the employees are immersed in the teaching community. In order to be an employee of the tpt, you have to be in the classroom shadowing a teacher twice a year, i go once a month. That doesnt matter if you are an accountant or engineer, you need to be in the classroom twice a year. We bring teachers into tpt to ask them questions. Anna is a second grade teacher in new york that was looking to supplement her income. Not only did her tpt store simply skilled take off in just a few days, more importantly she found exactly what founder paul intended when he started the company ten years ago. How important is the community of tpt for you . Oh, my goodness, its probably more important than anything. Tpt has been such a huge part of my life the last four years. They invite us here, they want your feedback, they want to know how they can better this business and how they can help children and empower teachers. Thats what they are all about. Its amazing the collaboration and friend ships that have been created because of tpt. During a president ial Campaign Season it can be hard to get away from conversations about politics, especially this year when there is so much to talk about. So what is the best way to keep political discourse at bay . The office . David lewis is the founder, president and ceo of operations ink, Human Resources and outsourcing firm. Good to see you. Hi, jj, how are you . Im good. Theres so much to talk about, particularly this year, right . Is there an election going on . Yeah, right . Especially youre at minneaposny on for a couple hours, youll see more. With people on different sides of the table, how do you keep this away . People are going to talk about it. You cant keep the approach of taking this out of the discussion in the workplace and it is a very polarizing issue. So you have to look at it from a few different angles. Accept the idea that its going to get discussed but there are danger points. Telling people they cant talk about it is a problem. Ownership coming out and making a strong statement about what their views are on politics is also a problem because it also can be polarizing. So its best to give some advice to people to just keep the conversation to a minimum versus telling people you dont want it to happen in the office. And try to diffuse as quickly as possible in the more passionate discussions. If you have to pull people aside who are more passionate, explain to them, listen. The more passionate you are in the office the greater chance it will create some level of conflict with others who dont share the same views you do. Lets get tactical about this, what do you do . Do you have a conference about it, send an email, how do you get the information across . Theres different wisdoms here. Go ahead and put a policy out there but that can create issues in terms of what the law says because the National LaborRelations Board may come in and say, wait a second, thats limiting peoples free ability to free speech and concerted activity. So i think the policy a little bit different to craft without getting yourself in some trouble. So moving forward, i think you want to go ahead and just have more small conversations, pull people aside, is specially when you see the conversation getting a bit out of hand. Stay away from something printed. Nothing printed. Chances are you are not going to be there when somebodys having a heated conversation. So then it escalates and now suddenly theres conflict between two people. Its a typical hr issue. Go ahead and bring the individuals in creating the issue or who have identified an issue and complain in some passion and try to work through it like any other item in employee relations. Try to talk through and say, i understand you have differing views, we are not going to take sides here. Were simply going to say this type of discussion has potential problems within the workplace so we want to tone the rhetoric down and maybe this is not the best place to bring these things up. Have you seen this happen a lot . I see it happen almost every day. Really . Not to the point that people are just on different sides, that happens all the time, but to the point it escalates and is creating a problem in the workplace . This particular election is one that is extremely polarizing and it is demonstrating in office places as well as just everywhere around the country how people have very significant and different views from one another. So its natural that its going to come up in the course of conversation and someone is going to come in and make a comment in favor of somebodys political stance and someone is going to come in and have a completely opposing view. The more that spills into the workplace the more its going to create that type of potential firestorm if you dont go ahead and diffuse it. I guess you talk about it as anything, say we are a culture of openness, hopefully one is, right . And we dont want to insult each other. We want this to be a place where people feel happy coming to work, people feel safe coming to work, and its okay for us to have differing views but litz not insult each other and not make each other feel badly about it. Again, you have to walk a fine line because you dont want to imp ply youre not saying dont talk. The talking thing is going to happen, its the companys culture to have communication, but what most Business Owners will say is it will start to potentially get out of hand. They want to bring people in smaller groups and say, i know youre a supporter of this candidate or this perspective, tone it down in the workplace. Maybe you simply say, lets be respectful of each other, right . Were all going to have different opinions and thats okay. Were here to work, we have a common goal and a Common Mission around this particular business. Youre absolutely entitled to your business and your perspective. It is all opinionbased. On that basis, youre entitled to your opinion but remember, take a hard look at how people react to that opinion and figure out is that going to be conducive to you being an effective employee, a good coworker and be able to focus on what it is youre here to do. Yes, it is an interesting time and lots of people have a lot to say. So i think it is important that we have you on to talk about how do we deal with this in the workplace. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs we have spoken to over the years like Tommy Hilfigger and stewart whitesmith told us one of the keys to their success was learning from their mistakes. Failure, large or small, happens to everyone at some point. But what you do after making a bad call makes all the difference in the world. Just ask the owners of skincare line j. Paul. They overcame some costly decisions which they shared so you can avoid the same pitfalls. Massive skin care like j. Paul may have entered a line when they start in 2007, but for the investors that was no deterrent. Our products really are targeted for those guys that do have thick beards, like myself. And my business partner, paul strong, has very sensitive skin. We felt that there really was a market void there. For them it was unchartered territory. I had zero. I had that no experience at all, came from an oil and gas background and some lodgistings logistics, we didnt have any industry knowledge. While they might have been at a slight disadvantage, you wont know it. We used our boot straps from the very beginning. We have very little outside investment. In addition to the companys website, j. Paul products are found all over the country including nordstrum, macys and highend boutiques. They admit to mistakes along the way. You have to be willing as a Business Owner to make the mistakes. One of the first challenges included the developing of packaging. At first the entrepreneurs turned to china. That just took too much time. What we found was that part of being in china is you have to wait six weeks for every interration of the packaging. If you get it back and its not the right color, you have to wait six more weeks for the adjustme adjustment. A Canadian Company came back with the right packaging but the company had already wasted a lot of money. From the time we first contacted the company in china to when we received the tubes. It was close to about 15,000 start to finish. The ceo said at one point this Texas Company used a Distribution Center in connecticut. As we were growing and the demand was growing and the orders were coming in, so at the advice of our consultants, we moved or operation to a fulfillment center. We paid a monthly fee. But then the customers started to complain. We just kept getting more feedback from customers with pictures, this is what arrived to me and it just wasnt up to standard. We just didnt have the quality control. Distribution was eventually brought back to houston. But not without losing money first. After it was all said and done, we took a 20,000 to 25,000 hit that we wont be able to recoup. As a result of that, were not getting product thats arriving anywhere damaged. Marketing was another hurdle. J. Paul ran newspaper ads in markets like dallas and chicago where products were starting to sell. They launched a social Media Campaign, too. We felt that we needed to have some sort of advertising campaign, whether its print media, online, and that was a major mistake. The newspaper ads didnt bring in any new customers. Quickly added up to 15,000, almost 20,000. The social Media Campaign wasnt any better. We probably invested close to sunshine somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000. The lack of name recognition didnt help when j. Paul looked for a spokesperson either. We felt inevidently we needed to be in the bigger box stores, bigger retail stores. And as a way to bring recognition and exposure and bring some clout, we felt like a celebrity endorser would give us the cash we needed to walk in the door. Despite hiring a talent agent and meeting facetoface with one celebrity, nothing materialized. I think the official reason was we were not really a known company. That search cost them 15,000 which never amounted to anything. But it turns out j. Paul never needed that kind of endorsement. The product spoke for themselves and customers responded. In the end it really is about your product being able to stand alone by itself. While all agree the money lost could have been better spent, this was a learning experience. It may have been costly but in the end j. Paul is a Better Company because of it. Sure, mistakes probably did motivate us. I dont think every company can do everything right every single day. Were human, mistakes are going to happen but its how you really adopt to learn from this sort of mistake. In proving your Small Businesss performance, its difficult if youre not measuring your companys progressive effectively. We turneded to venture. Com to see if your business is on the right track. One, web traffic. Measure how people are engaging with your tools using google analytics. Knowing how visitors are finds out about you and what products and services are piqueing their interest. Two, customer satisfaction. Ask them to fill out a simple survey. Three, social media. Monitor what people are saying about your company on different platforms. Check for comments and responses at least once a day. Four, finances. Small businesses often fail because they incorrectly budgeted or forecasted their funds. So track your Financial Performance to ensure you have an accurate sense of your cash flow. And five, productivity. Assess how efficient your employees are day to day. Analyze ways you can help them improve their performance output so your company as a whole can continue to expand. Spring is here and the weathers getting nicer and that means that a lot of you are going to go outside to do some guard anything. Todays elevator pitcher has expertise in the landscaping business to come up with a product to make weeding a little easier. Now well see if our panel thinks his business can grow. Les investor. He is also author of the new book called the 10 entrepreneur leaive your startp dream without quitting your day job. My name is vinnie, ive been to the garden called the ringleader. In my 30 years in the landscape business, i pulled out many weeds. This is how i calm up with a solution to know that the best way to weed is with your hands. You slip it over your index finger. You use the fork to loosen up the root of the weed. You then use your thumb and index finger to pull out the weed, root and all. This is very good in vegetable gardens and flower beds where other tools wont fit. In 2013, i was overfunded on kickstarter by 248 . Since then ive been featured by this old house magazine. With the help of my son, we are currently selling online and in over 100 stores throughout the country. We need a 50,000 investment in order to increase our inventory, lower our production costs by 32 cre cents to 16 cents. That way well have a higher profit and well be able to fulfill the orders from the bigbox stores. Thank you and let the ring be your weeder. Thank you, vinny. Nice job. Thank you. Okay. Im going to give these to you two. I want two numbers from you, 1 to 10. The first one is what did you think of the product . Second, what did you think of the pitch . How did you make your first prototype . I went to a welder the day after thanksgiving in 2012. And he liked the idea so much that he made a bunch of prototypes over and over for me for free because he wanted to see it on the market. So i went to this oldtime welder. He did it for me. Good for you. Lets get the answers. Les, lets start with you. Im going to give 8 for the product, elegant, simple, im going to give 6 for the pitch. Heres the reason why. I think if i want to invest, i want to hear about the business, not just the product. I want to hear about the market, your current sales activities. I want to know that youre going to expand and maybe hear about product extension so that im not investing just in a single product. Kickstarter, perfect for the product, but how are you going to pitch the business and not just the product . I love it. You should have a different pitch for different people. Investors versus customers. Patrick. So i gave you a 7 for the product and an 8 for the pitch. The reason i gave you a 7 was because i love this product. I get it. I weeded gardens to make money as a kid. But where i was a little worried was about whether or not this was defensible. Its a Pretty Simple tool, and i just wonder if somebody could rip you off and basically take your entire lunch and eat it. In terms of the pitch, i love the passion you brought. I love that that you convinced me that youre the man to build this business. That really got me excited and you told me about your partners who are highly credible which made me think this guys got something. Thank you so much. Well, it sounds like youve got great traction already. Good luck with everything. I have ring weeders for both of you guys. I have one for you, too, if you want one. Thanks. I will be handing that over to my husband. Thanks, both of you. Thank you. If any of you out there have a product or a service and you want feedback from our elevator pitch panel on your chances of getting interested investors, send us an email. The address is yourbusiness msnbc. Com. Include a short summary of your company does, how much money youre trying to raise and what you intend to do with that money. We look forward to reading all of your pitches and seeing some of you here on the show. When we come back, what you need to know about writing a Business Plan. And will you ready when walmart or google calls . Our cosmetics line was a hit. The orders were rushing in. I could feel our deadlines racing towards us. We didnt need a loan. We needed shortterm funding fast. Building 18 homes in 4 ½ months . That was a leap. But i knew i could rely on American Express to help me buy those building materials. Amex helped me buy the inventory i needed. Our amex helped us fill the orders. Just like that. Another step on the journey. Will you be ready when growth presents itself . Realize your buying power at open. Com how does one write a Business Plan when contemplating starting a business . Is there someone who will do this for you or help you with an outline . So i want you to think about your Business Plan as a flight plan. Like this. A pilot would never get in an airplane in new york and fly to los angeles without a flight plan, right . Of course, he needs or she needs to know which direction theyre going to head in. They need to know how much gas theyre going to need. Theyre going to need to know landmarks to look for along the way. Thats exactly what your Business Plan is, is your flight plan for the success of your business. And what you want to do is think through all the things that youre going to need to know to run your business. How much money are you going to need . What are the obstacles that you likely are going to face along the way . Whos your competition . How are you going to market your business . How are you going to do your money . If you think it through all ahead of time, youre going to have a far greater chance of being successful because youve thought it through. And youre going to find obstacles that you anticipated and some that you didnt. But if you thought through your plan, then youre going to be at least prepared to deal with it. How are you going to do that . There is all sorts of help for you along the way. You could go to score, score is a Great Organization with people who could help you come up with a Business Plan and work through your Business Plan. Theres a website i like a lot calls bplans. Com. They have some Interactive Software that really helps a lot. Just do a search, find some help, and youll find that you can create your own flight plan for the success of your Small Business. We now have the top 2 tips you need to know to help your Small Business grow. Les and patrick are back with us. Let me pick your brains. Les, lets start with you. My tip today, j. J. , is know what youre going to do when walmart calls or google or department of defense. What ive seen so often is you get that precious call or email or the sale goes through, and before you know it, you dont own your business anymore. Youre doing precisely what this massive supplier tells you to. Six months later, youre totally making everything to their specification. They move on to a lowercost supplier. Youve got to start all over again. Know how to manage the relationship at the start. And most importantly, plan to exit because you dont want to be that vulnerable. You dont want to have more than 20 , 25 of your revenue from you in one source. Think about what are you going to do when walmart stacalls . Patrick. Say no to fomo. Fear of missing out for anyone who does not know. Exactly. And i was exited by boston magazine with actually coining that term. Really . Wow its something i know about in my own life. When youre starting a business, everybody is going to tell you you should do this. You should enter this market. You should try this out. Try that out. You need to focus. And if you listen to fomo, youre going to spend your time doing things that arent going to drive your business forward and trying too many things. So instead of if. Omo, try focus. Great. Thank you so much, both of you. This weeks yourbizselfie comes from christine. She owns Hair Solutions in niles, illinois. After managing a number of Small Businesses, christine struck out on her own at 62 and started this company that makes custom hair replacements for men and women. What an inspiration and a reminder that you can start a company at any age. Now, we love celebrating your businesses. So please pick up your cell phone and take a selfie of you and your company and send it to us at yourbusiness msnbc. Com or tweet it to msnbcyourbiz. Thank you, everyone, so much for joining us today. I think one of the biggest takeaways came from the top five, and its about metrics. We should all have a dashboard of the metrics that drive our business. And if you dont have this or if you dont even know what those metrics are, you theyd to step back and figure that out. And you should look at that dashboard daily, weekly, monthly and yearly so you know what levers to pull to increase your business. Wed love to hear from you as well. If you have any questions or comments about todays show, just send us an email to yourbusiness msnbc. Com. You can also go to our website. Its openforum. Com yourbusiness. We posted all the segments from todays show. And dont forget to connect with us on all of our digital and social media platforms, too. Next week we meet the entrepreneur of a superhero Costume Company who found himself deep in debt and on the verge of losing everything. How he rescued his Small Business and now has the company flying high. Till then, im j. J. Ramberg, and remember, we make your business our business. Our cosmetics line was a hit. The orders were rushing in. I could feel our deadlines racing towards us. We didnt need a loan. We needed shortterm funding fast. Building 18 homes in 4 ½ months . That was a leap. But i knew i could rely on American Express to help me buy those building materials. Amex helped me buy the inventory i needed. Our amex helped us fill the orders. Just like that. Another step on the journey. Will you be ready when growth presents itself . Realize your buying power at open. Com the flint water crisis. Two years later. Will there be more criminal charges . And will the families get justice . We talk to michigan senator gary peters. Its a basic right in this country. They cant wait any longer. Also, meet the new trump. Same as the old trump. Ive said some things in fun. A lot of that was entertainment. Is it all just a big act . And on the democratic side, will Bernie Sanders know when to say when . If we do not have a majority, i think its going to be very hard for us to win. Plus, why Harriet Tubman matters. And a unique side of prince that you wont hear about anywhere else