Recently our CEO, Kisha Mays, was featured on Beyond 8 Figures with Steve Olsher in regards to Just Fearless and HERstory Connections. It was a great interview and very thorough that gives entrepreneurs a blueprint on the failures (aka lessons learned) that they can avoid and how. Have a listen.

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You Are A Bad Ass At Making Money

Written by: Jen Sincero

Genre: Wealth Building

Available on: Amazon

Website: https://jensincero.com/

Book Summary:

You Are a Badass at Making Money will launch you past the fears and stumbling blocks that have kept financial success beyond your reach. Drawing on her own transformation—over just a few years—from a woman living in a converted garage with tumbleweeds blowing through her bank account to a woman who travels the world in style, Jen Sincero channels the inimitable sass and practicality that made You Are a Badass an indomitable bestseller. She combines hilarious personal essays with bite-size, aha concepts that unlock earning potential and get real results.

Bio on the Author: 

Jen Sincero is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, success coach and motivational cattle prod who's helped countless people transform their personal and professional lives via her products, speaking engagements, newsletters, seminars and books. Her #1 New York Times bestseller, You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life (2013), has sold well over a million copies, is available in twenty-plus languages, and continues to grow in popularity around the globe. Her follow-up, You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth (2017), also a New York Times bestseller, is written with the same inimitable sass, down-to-earth humor and blunt practicality that made You Are a Badass an indomitable bestseller and Jen a celebrated voice in the world of self development. Based on her own transformation, from a frustrated forty year-old living in a converted garage watching tumbleweeds blow through her empty bank account, to a successful business owner traveling the world in style, You Are a Badass at Making Money is a testament to the fact that, in Jen's words: "If my broke ass can get rich, you can too."

As a highly sought-after speaker, Jen has shared her signature brand of motivational comedy with everyone from women entrepreneurs to multi national corporations to non-profits to educational institutions to her mom's book group. In 2011 she sold most of her possessions and spent the next three years running her business from all corners of the globe, writing, speaking, coaching and encouraging people to live lives of unbridled awesomeness.

Jen Sincero

You may be looking at this image and thinking what does an egg have to do with why you're supporting women authors. Right? The image above recently broke the record for most likes (over 50,000,000 likes) on Instagram which had been previously held by Kylie Jenner. It went viral and it's sole purpose was to break Kylie Jenner's record of most liked photo on Instagram. We saw that and thought what if that had been an image of book? What would the impact have been for that author?

The idea had already been there for us to launch our Book of the Week series, but this definitely helped make it happen sooner. The primary reason for doing this is because of our CEO's personal experience with self publishing her own book a few years ago on Amazon, "From Failure to Fearless". She is an avid book lover and personal supporter of public libraries. This has been something she has always wanted to do because she understood the challenges that many authors face in getting publicity for their books. 

Submit Your Book for Consideration

****We also have to add this piece for clarity. Our process is not immediate for selecting books. As you can imagine we have a ton of submissions from authors at major publishing houses, independent publishing houses, and self published authors. Our process is to review every single submission fairly, read a few chapters and/or even the entire book, look at table of contents, and the authors information. That takes time. So no one will receive an immediate response and not everyone will be selected as it is clearly marked as "Book of the Week" and there are only so many weeks in the year. but just know that every single submission is considered thoroughly regardless if they are a HERstory member or not. It is a FREE service for you if your book is selected.

In addition to our regular duties for our HERstory Members, our Angel Fund exclusively for Female Founders, and corporate duties in supporting and providing global business development for primarily women owned SME's internationally, we have added this initiative because of a personal experience of our CEO, Kisha Mays. She self published her own book a few years ago on Amazon titled "From Failure to Fearless".

She understands what it takes for authors to get publicity and sales for their work and to generate additional revenue streams from it. She created this Book of the Week series (for our members and for the general public) and additional monthly book club (for our members) to create an avenue to support women authors because millions of books are published around the world annually and only a fraction truly get the support they need for the work to seen and read by more people.

Most are self published thanks to companies like Amazon, Lulu Press, Smashwords, Bookbaby, and independently. The average author sells 250 copies or less of their book throughout the books' publishing life. If an author is luck enough to sell that much or more it still may not even recoup the time, effort, and additional costs such as editing, formatting, cover illustration, etc put into publishing their work. This is not even including marketing costs and efforts. So we truly do offer this service for FREE to help change those odds in your favor. That said, you don't have to be a member to submit your book but we have to tell you that our HERstory members do receive priority in submission consideration. If we didn't say that upfront it could create problems later down the line.

The overwhelming majority of our members are NOT authors, just business owners in a multitude of industries. We don't do this just for them, we do this for the general public as well to get the world reading and learning about new books and genres that they may not have known about. That is the purpose of this. It is unfortunate that this had to be blogged about, but we won't let the negative experience of dealing with 1 person (via their independent female owned publisher) complaining that they were not selected immediately stop us from promoting this initiative to the masses and fulfilling our mission of this initiative. 

We thank you for your submission. We are considering books for the remainder of Spring and Summer with deadline extension to submit until April 10th. Once we have all those selected. We will open it again to start selecting books for the Fall and the Winter. 

Roadmap for Revolutionaries

Written by: Elisa Camahort Page

Genre: Political Advocacy and Human Rights

Available on: Amazon Kindle

Website: www.elisacp.com

Book Summary:

Are you ready to take action and make your voice heard, but don't know how to go about it? This hands-on, hit-the-ground-running guide delivers lessons on practical tactics for navigating and protecting one's personal democracy in a gridlocked, heavily surveilled, and politically volatile country. If you want to start making a difference but don’t know what to do next, Road Map for Revolutionaries provides the resources needed to help you feel safer, more empowered, invested in, and intrinsic to the American experiment. The book addresses timely topics such as staying safe at protests, supporting marginalized communities, online privacy, and how to keep up the fight for the long term, breaking down key issues and outlining action steps for local, state, and federal levels of government. 

Bio on the Author: 

Known as the co-founder and COO of scrappy start-up-turned-global women's media company BlogHer, Inc., She is now focused on , speaking, writing (check out her debut book available now) and strategic consulting with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and organizations at inflection points when contemplating pivots, diversifying and scaling their revenue streams, and looking for better ways to get their narrative out into the world, especially via events, online community building, and content creation. 

Elisa Camahort Page

A simple mission of feeding hungry kids has seen Eat My Lunch’s founder and CEO Lisa King crowned New Zealand’s Woman Entrepreneur of the Year. 

The win will see Ms King represent New Zealand at the International Woman Entrepreneur of the Year competition later this year in France.
The award – hosted by The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) and presented by innovation accelerator Mahuki and fintech company MYOB – celebrates female entrepreneurs who aspire to tackle major social, cultural and environmental issues within their communities. 

Lisa King first had the idea for Eat My Lunch in 2014 when she decided to do something about reports of children going hungry at local schools.

Drawing on US-based TOMS Shoes’ buy-a-pair-give-a-pair social enterprise business model, King hit upon the idea of selling quality delivered lunches and using part of the revenue to provide a meal to hungry children.
“I couldn’t believe that kids were going hungry in my backyard. I wanted to do something about it and come up with a model that could be self-sustaining and scalable,” she says.
“Our  goal for the next 3 years is to feed half of the 25,000 kids who go to school and don’t have lunch every day.”

Eat My Lunch has now delivered more than one million lunches to kids in need. The business has partnered with corporates like Foodstuffs, to enable greater reach, and is even looking at taking the model offshore.

MYOB country manager Ingrid Cronin-Knight says MYOB is thrilled to be teaming up with Mahuki for the first ever New Zealand chapter of the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award.

“MYOB is passionate about supporting New Zealand’s incredible female entrepreneurs. Lisa King is a worthy recipient of this award for how she’s taken a simple concept and turned it into a winning idea that does so much good in our community,” she says.
“We’re excited about working with Mahuki to showcase New Zealand’s leading female entrepreneurs like Lisa to the world.”

Ms King will go on to represent New Zealand at the International Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award ceremony as part of the Impact2 World Forum in Paris on 29 March. The annual event – created by global startup platform INCO – brings together over 1,000 decision-makers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors and media from more than 50 countries worldwide to discuss solutions to society's most pressing challenges.

“It’s incredible to have the chance to promote New Zealand’s business community on the world stage and to show how we are making an impact on a key social issue,” says Ms King.

Thank you NZ Business for bringing this to the World Stage.

A love-hate relationship

Women have traditionally had a love-hate relationship with money. On the one hand, we love to spend it (can you say Gucci or Jimmy Choo), but we hate to talk about it. Many women were brought up that it’s impolite or embarrassing to talk about money. In one study conducted by Merrill Lynch, 61% of women said they would rather discuss the details of their own death than money! Women also tend to have a more complicated relationship with money than men. For women, money represents not only purchasing power but also security and the ability to care for their families. This creates an emotional connection which can make money more frightening to deal with. Unfortunately, these attitudes around money are impacting the ability of female entrepreneurs to secure the funding they need to grow their businesses. According to the 2018 State of Women-Owned Businesses report by American Express, “there is a significant gap between the number of women who start businesses and those who commit to growing them. Unlocking the potential of women-owned businesses represents a powerful opportunity for economic growth.” It’s time for female entrepreneurs to overcome the money taboo, ask for what they need and embrace what money can do.

Women don’t ask

We’ve seen the statistics many times; women don't ask for raises as often as men. Linda Babcock, Carnegie Mellon University economics professor and co-author of Women Don’t Ask, says men are four times more likely than women to ask for a raise—and when women do ask, they typically request 30% less than men do. This trend applies to female entrepreneurs as well. According to data from the Kauffman Foundation, 40% of new entrepreneurs in the U.S. are now women, and the number of new women-owned businesses is growing at double the rate of male-owned businesses. In spite of this incredible growth, women are not asking for the funding they need to grow their new ventures. A recent study published in Venture Capital showed that females are less likely to ask for outside funding than their male counterparts. This phenomenon is supported by a survey from SCORE with data collected from more than 20,000 U.S. small business showing that only 25% of women entrepreneurs seek financing over the lifespan of their business. Another study by Fundera revealed that female entrepreneurs who do seek funding ask for roughly $35,000 less than men do. As Susan Sarandon’s character Louise Sawyer famously declared in the movie Thelma and Louise, “you get what you settle for.” So, how can we get women to ask for the funds they need to grow their businesses? It all starts with the right mindset.

To read the rest of the article, click here. 

From Failure to Fearless - Still Completely Flawed But Thriving Fearlessly

Written by: Kisha Mays

Genre: Business

Available on: Amazon Kindle

Website: www.justfearlesswomen.com and www.justfearless.com 

Book Summary:

What if you could learn how to create a fearless and successful future while embracing your failures and flaws? And what if all it would take was a quick $3 read? Would you take the chance to change your life and bring your dreams to the forefront? In this quick and easy read, I show you how I went from being a "bodyrub phone girl" (this industry is considered prostitution in most states) to a fearless entrepreneur all while still being completely flawed. I am only human, just like you.

Bio on the Author: 

Kisha Mays is a Successful Serial Entrepreneur, Visionary Global Business Development Strategist, Best Selling Author, Angel Investor, and Philanthropist. Her primary focus is on helping to develop 1,000,000 Fearless Female Entrepreneurs generating a minimum of $1,000,000+ in annual revenue. Turning them into unicorn global businesses through the Just Fearless Angel Fund (www.justfearlessangels.com) which is a fund exclusively for female founded companies. She pays it forward by supporting non-profits worldwide that specifically support & empower women and girls

Her major influences are Madam C. J. Walker, Oprah Winfrey, Sara Blakely, Malala Yousafzai, Nelson Mandela, and Richard Branson, for their fearlessness, exceptional courage, drive and ambition, willingness to go after what they desire & believe in all while setting the standard and breaking through any and all ceilings. Even with all the success she has achieved, Kisha still feels like she is only getting started. Based on her early success at a young age and her drive and ambition, her future and continued success is undoubtedly going to leave a major mark in history. She is Just Fearless and Building Her Global Just Fearless Empire!

Kisha Mays

Canada is revving up its economy by focusing on women entrepreneurs. Its Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES) comes with a $2 billion investment. “We have the potential of adding up to $150 billion dollars in incremental GDP to the Canadian economy,” said Mary Ng, Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion. "Our government believes that women's economic empowerment is not just the right thing to do; it's good for the bottom line. The strategy seeks to double the number of women-owned businesses."  Currently, only 16% of all small-to-medium-sized businesses in Canada are majority women-owned.

These programs take advantage of a growing appetite among Canadian women to become entrepreneurs. Canadian women are starting businesses at a higher rate than their counterparts in all other G20 countries. The G20 is an informal group of 19 countries and the European Union, with representatives of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. “Canada has seen a surge of entrepreneurship in our economy over the last 20 years, and women have been at the forefront, launching businesses at rates that often outpace men,” said Karen Hughes, a professor at the University of Alberta’s Alberta School of Business and Department of Sociology, and author of the 2015/16 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Canada Report on Women’s Entrepreneurship.

During the next five years, the WES Ecosystem Fund will spend up to $85 million on training, networking events, mentorship opportunities, accelerators, and incubators as well as supplier-diversity programs that provide business development opportunities to work with government agencies and large corporations. The program will allocate an additional $8.62 million for a Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, a one-stop source for knowledge, data and best practices. 

To read the rest of this article, Click Here. 

https://youtu.be/c42e4J-v8mA

The video above is less than 1 minute. Check it out!

This experience was also written about in our CEO's book "From Failure to Fearless" (available on Amazon) and published in March 2014. Time to revisit again as it is amazing when people will take what is written (even if someone writes under a fake name or anonymous) as truth.


Repost:
A personal negative business experience for Just Fearless LLC to help other small businesses:

There is something so truly mind-boggling about the ability to write something about a business and/or person based on slander and lies online and on social media and people take it as fact. They don't consider the website it was written on, they don't look at the response below the complaint on sites such as Rip Off Report (which deliberately creates a huge separation from the complaint up top, then tons of ads, then any rebuttal response)and others like Complaint Board.

They don't look at the fact that someone used a fake name to write the same complaint (on multiple sites) and/or social media, they don't look at the date of the complaint (9 years ago) and even one last year for a company that we declined to fund via the angel fund (this women pretended to be a man from Boston even though men are not eligible for our fund - how petty can one get).

People complain all the time, these same sites (RipOff Report & Complaints Board) have complaints against Amazon, Whole Foods, Hay House Inc, Barnes & Noble, Wells Fargo, Pepsi, Sallie Mae, Taco Bell, Apple, T-Mobile, Avis Car Rental etc., and yet they are ALL still in business despite having hundreds and sometimes thousands of complaints on these websites and more. Yet people do business with them.

But if someone finds one or 2 complaints over a 10 year period for a small business and it is automatically thought to be true without any verification or even questioning it or reading the rebuttal at the bottom. This happened to us. Two complaints over 8 years apart, written by people under fake names and making up stories to get return fire for being fired (intern fired years ago and wrote the same exact false complaint over multiple sites) and a female founder (who was not chosen to be funded in our first round last year) who decided to be pretend to be a man (men cannot apply for the fund) and wrote a false report about it. We answered both in rebuttals and it still shows up until this day.

Anyone can write anything about anyone and there are no consequences unless you want to take the time to go after them legally but you know they don't have anything of value so why spend the money? However, at some point if it continues to affect your business, then you have to fight back and stand your ground and we will do that in the future going forward. 

This is how we got to where we are as a society and country. This is how the US got Trump because people are taking anything that is written online as truth without due diligence, asking questions directly, and common sense before taking any action.

For any company that has every had to deal with this, especially small businesses, this video gives you tips on how to deal with that. Keep going and don't let anyone or anything stop you. Just Do It!

If people are not smart enough or willing to use common sense when it comes to discerning and questioning what's truth and what's really "Fake News", then they are not someone you want to do business with. Remember this the next time you do a Google search on someone or a company and something like RipOff Report or something similar comes up. Read it thoroughly including any rebuttals, Ask the company or contact about it directly, and consider the source of the complaint rather than making assumptions.  Common Sense is not so common these days.

For someone to go by the logic of it is on "Ripoff Report" so it must be true, then that means you should not want to do business with them.  In this day in age where fake news is really a thing, you will not be able to please everyone as you build your brand and business and there will always be haters who want to see you fail.

So don't be deterred by that, keep going. If you are a small business it is in your best interest to provide a rebuttal to a complaint no matter how ridiculous it is. It is also in your best interest to address it head on and be open about it. There is nothing to hide as no one is perfect and you cannot please everyone.

Keep going! Don't let the words of someone else stop you. If others can't see it. Your business serves a purpose and the worlds needs to know about it! Rise above it all! We are Just Fearless LLC!

Women in the cannabis industry.

The number of female executives in cannabis stands at 27 percent, higher than the 23 percent average number of executive positions held by women across all industries nationwide, according to Marijuana Business Daily. That’s good, but the number of female marijuana executives made up 36 percent of the industry in 2015.

Women seem galvanized. Celebrity women in cannabis are well known, such as Whoopi Goldberg and Melissa Etheridge. But below the cultural radar, more women are getting into the industry, especially on designing new products.

Female stars in cannabis.

According to the Robb Report, one of  the biggest female names in cannabis is Patricia Rosi, CEO of Wellness Connection of Maine. The company runs four dispensaries. The site describes the four dispensaries as “safe” and “inviting” and say they combine “the best features of a pharmacy, community center and wellness practice.”

Nancy Whiteman of Wana Brands is another big name among female cannabis entrepreneurs. Her Colorado-based company sells cannabis edibles, including a very popular line of gummy bears. The company has expanded into Oregon, Nevada and Arizona and plans to move into Florida, Illinois and Michigan this year.

Many women are leading the way with specific wellness-focused products. For example, Kush Queen, run by Olivia Alexander, offers cannabis-infused bath bombs, tinctures and lotions. Alexander told the Robb Report that women moving into the cannabis industry “fits into the current women’s wave: running for office, running companies. Cannabis is a part of that new liberation.”

To read the entire article Click Here.