Molly GORDON

President, Shaboom, Inc.

Come listen to Molly’s story in Seattle on November 8-9,  2010 at Dream It! Launch It! Live It!

Featured Lady Molly Gordon, Master Certified Coach, is dedicated to helping accidental entrepreneurs reconcile the challenges of building thriving livelihoods and loving their lives. She describes an accidental entrepreneur as someone “who cares deeply about the work they are here to do in the world and who may not have thought about self-employment or freelancing as the equivalent of being in business.” Having struggled with running her own fiber art small business, Molly launched Shaboom, Inc. once she discovered that coaching others was her calling.

Prior to starting Shaboom, Inc., Molly worked in a myriad of industries and jobs, from government, business and non-profit to word-processing, publicity, business planning, editing and layout. She even gained experience managing and increasing the visibility of her husband Miles’ architecture firm. “Managing his company allowed me to understand running a business,” she says. “I learned about working for yourself and earning a paycheck.” The skills Molly acquired would serve her well as a coach years later.

Molly coaches accidental entrepreneurs from a place of understanding – because she was one herself. In 1987 she started her first company, a part-time wearable art business spawned from her lifelong fascination with knitting and sewing. Two years later, she quit her day job and opened Mollycoddles, a wearable art studio, but ended up closing its doors in 1995.

“Self-employment proved to be the most challenging path I had ever walked,” Molly reveals. “I made every mistake a person could make, and then went on to make some more.”

Monday Musings: Creating from Molly Gordon on Vimeo.

Around the same time Molly folded her company, she was receiving unsolicited requests from friends asking her to help manage and market their small businesses. “I recognized a need from people I knew who had no idea about business; specifically, marketing and getting press,” she says. Soon, Molly was advising small business owners, but didn’t realize she was actually coaching them until someone showed her an article.

“I received a note from a client with a Newsweek article about coaching. After reading it, I thought, ‘By God, this is what I really do!’” Molly recalls. “When I found out about coaching, it was as though someone had designed a profession for which my past had been the perfect training.”

So, Molly started Shaboom in 1996. Offering business coaching, teleclasses, books and seminars, she helps clients evolve authentic practices that make doing business a heartfelt expression of their gifts while ensuring that they prosper. “In short, you learn to love marketing, and you learn to do business in a way that feeds your soul as well as your bank account.”

Molly feels that business success and personal growth are intertwined. She professes, “The more you grow and develop personally, the more you achieve the emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being you want, the more successful you will be at building a business where the person you have always wanted to be can do work you have always wanted to do.”

With regard to her first company, Molly has a theory about why it failed. “You need to have inner and outer alignment in your business,” she explains. “Mollycoddles was just about myself, whereas Shaboom is about others and creating value for my clients.”

Molly’s vision for Shaboom, Inc. is to help end the epidemic of under earning among accidental entrepreneurs. “I want to help those people to come to work, love what they do but haven’t considered it a business,” she says. “They may not charge enough for their services and could go out of business.”

She also believes that a work-life balance is critical to success. “My husband and I really value our time together and our quality of life over money,” Molly says. “If I’m over-worked, then I’m less present in my home life and not as productive and creative at work.’”

“I call it ‘putting banks on the river,’ setting boundaries around the use of my time,” Molly says. “I build in time off.”

She will be a speaker at the Ladies Who Launch Global Conference’s Seattle location on November 8 – 9, 2010.

What we learned from Molly: “If you want to make a big impact, manage for profitability and growth, not to just pay yourself.”

Bright Idea
“Let your light shine.”

Claim Your Space
“Female entrepreneurs have so much to offer. If you play too small, you’ll get overlooked and not be able to help those you want to.”

Big Picture
“Pay attention to your overall arc of business. Have a plan and a goal to finance it, don’t just go month to month.”

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This Featured Lady was profiled by Megan L. Reese, WORDrobe® Stylist for Her Write Image in West Grove, PA.

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