For those who constantly find new ways to grow on every step of the journey, American Express open proudly presented 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 temperature 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. Thats because shes a selfmade millionaire, the first of several teachers that have 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 new York City Public School teacher Pawel Edelman had to worry about when he started the company 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, interactive 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 concept, adoption was slow. The journey was a study in the three ps, patience, persistence and perseverance. There were highs like the purchase of the company by scholastic and lowes. After the acquisition, there was no growth, then the business almost closed down. In a lastditch effort to keep the company alive, paul bought it back in 2009 to save the community and the business from obscurity. It feels like a tenyear long over night success story. If you talk to teachers, they almost always know about it. Teachers o people outside of the Teaching Community dont. But people outside the teaching profession dont and the companies kind of live under the radar. Its a place teachers came to get help. 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 downloading 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 theyre having real impact in classrooms. Because it is important to remember if youre a teacherpreneur on tpt, youre a teacher first, an entrepreneur second. Todayed in orlando, florida, two of tpts most successful teacherpreneurs have combined forces in two ways. Wheres my party people . There we go. By creating an event, the inaugural get your teach on conference. All of this helps grow the tpt community. We looked at each other and said, we have to start a conference. Within an hour, we had get your teach on logo, we had 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 as well as a successful store 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. Text, structure, very cab. 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 thats whats going to impact the 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 stays relative and connected by making sure all the tpt 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 are a Customer Support rep. You need to be in a classroom at least 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 edelman 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 friendships 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 . In 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 msnbc, stay on for a couple hours, youll see lots more. But theres so much. People are on different sides of the table. How do you keep this away at work . I mean, you cant. 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. You have to accept the idea that its going to get discussed. I think there are danger points, though. 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 any of those 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 prevailing wisdoms here. One is you can 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 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, especially 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 complained 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 go ahead and 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 you would anything, say we are a culture of openness, hopefully one is, right . And we dont want to insult each other. Correct. 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 lets 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 imply 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 see, theyll start to see it potentially getting out of hand. They want to bring people in smaller groups and say, i know youre a supporter of this candidate or of this particular 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 opinion, your perspective. Thats what it is. Its all opinion based. 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 had 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 Hilfiger 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. Mens skin caroline j. Paul may have entered a crowded field when it launched its shaving accessories in 2007, but for the founders, 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 no experience at all, came from an oil and gas background and some logistics, we didnt have real industry knowledge. While they may have been at a slight disadvantage, you wouldnt know it. We used our savings and boot strapped this company from the 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 dozens of highend boutiques which they credit for giving them a boost. They admit theyve made mistakes along the way. You have to be willing as a entrepreneur and Business Owner to be willing to make the mistakes. One of the first challenges involved the development 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 adjustment. A Canadian Company eventually produced the right packaging with the right shade of brown but j. Paul already wasted a lot of time and money. 18 months from the first 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 our operation to a Fulfillment Center that was recommended to us. 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. In these different cities. The social Media Campaign wasnt any better. We probably invested close to somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000. Probably closer to 15,000. The lack of name recognition didnt help when j. Paul looked for a spokesperson either. We felt inevitably we needed to be in the bigger box stores, bigger retail stores. As a way to bring recognition, bring exposure and bring some clout, we felt like a celebrity endorsement would give us the cache 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 that 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 adapt and learn from those sort of mistakes. In proving your Small Businesss performance is difficult if youre not measuring your companys progressive effectively. To turned 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 finding out about you and what products and services are piqueing their interest will help you better target your key audience. Two, customer satisfaction. Find this out by talking to your clients or asking 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 budget or forecast 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 gardening. 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 mccuen is the founder and ceo of predictable success and Patrick Mcginnis is a venture capitalist in private Equity Investor who found deer we go advisers. Hes also the author of the 10 entrepreneur, live your startup dream without quitting your day job. My name is vinnie. I invented a garden tool called the ring weeder. I pulled out many weeds being in the land escape business. The best way to weed is with your hands. Use the fork to penetrate the soil, losen up the root of the