MacStartup

Here’s my nineth story for about startups, here’s Sachin Rekhi’s answers to my interview questions.

1. What was/is your background toward business before you started your own (family of entrepreneurs, paper route, raising bunnies, school, classes, etc.)? I’ve always been passionate about solving problems through software. When I was a kid growing up in upstate New York, I started a little company called Gumball Software and made a lethal pong video game. In college, I created my own task management software called Sach Do and a store cash register and accounting software for my house dorm’s student store called Oasis Financials. It’s the fundamental desire to solve my own problems that motivates me to build software.

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Here is my next installment of Monday Motivations for MacStartups. Through email I interview a number of startup companies in various forms of their experience, both in business and using a Mac. Here is Caroline McClure of ScoutRock.com, they provide consulting and networking services to other corporate executive recruiting professionals.

1. What was/is your background toward business before you started your own (family of entrepreneurs, paper route, raising bunnies, school, classes, etc.)? I come from a non business-minded family and studied Sociology in school.  After college and a few years in non-profits, education institutions and waiting tables, I fell in to the business community and my profession by pure chance: a friend of mine indicated that she was going to graduate school and asked me if I wanted the job she would vacate.  I interviewed for it and received the offer.

That was almost 20 years ago.  Since then, I’ve worked in a visa and passport processing company, the largest global retained executive search firm, a boutique retained search firm, and as the executive recruiting department director of a Fortune 50 company (it’s F53 now).

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When you become a startup entrepreneur, you just start taking steps in the direction you want to take and with each step you get a little farther along toward your destination. But one thing is for sure along this path of startup entrepreneurship, you need to smell the roses along the way, take a pause and look back to where  you’ve been. So here’s a brief “smell the roses” part for every entrepreneur out there.

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Once you begin your startup entrepreneurship you at some point have to look down the road and consider an important question: What size do you want your business to be?

I read this book, Small Giants, and immediately found it a great source of inspiration and, in a sense, a weight off of my shoulders.

Most of us are just thinking about growing our business to make a good living, but there can be an upper limit, if you so choose, and it does not have to be the next Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft. Just being a small giant can do wonders for you, your business, and those that work around you.

In fact, I would not want anything better than to have a small giant company, keeps a “home town” feel of your organization.

So here’s their official web site: Small Giants

Great read and a good perspective.

Related articles

• Three Reasons Everything Goes Better with Partners (blogs.hbr.org)

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Here’s my seventh installment of startup entrepreneurs using a Mac. I interviewed Rachel Doyle of GlamourGals.org, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to inspire and organize teens to provide ongoing complimentary beauty makeovers and companionship to elderly women living in senior homes.

1. What was/is your background toward business before you started your own (family of entrepreneurs, paper route, raising bunnies, school, classes, etc.)? I was 16 when I thought of the idea of GlamourGals.  It was to honor my grandmother and provide a service to my community that actually went into the community.  In high school I was on sports teams, played a musical instrument, was in every club but what I found that whenever we did community service it was collecting a check, a can or joining a “Walk” we never really met any of the people we were trying to help.  I guess you could say I was quite the “go getter.”

2. What do you do, describe when you realized you wanted to start your business and how did you start it? I never really thought I was starting a business. I had an idea, it filled a need so I figured out how to just start doing it.  Little did I know that when I first executed it the NY Times would be there to capture the moment.

3. When and how did you get introduced to the Mac? I have to admit that I was working for PC’s for years. But a couple years ago I was fed up with the deadly blue screen and the lack of design functionality so I went Mac and will never go back.

4. What Mac solutions do you currently use (think Adobe, iWork, smart folders, GarageBand, ZumoDrive, Open Source Software)? Everything from shift + command + 4 (the handy screen shot) to Adobe, iMovie.

5. Give me your current perspective on marketing, sales, and running a business and how a Mac helps keep things running smoothly? It is great because you can do artistic stuff on it really easily – like go from designing a newsletter to balancing your books all in the same day — seamlessly.

6. Looking back from today, what has been the most significant things you’ve learned? I think the most significant thing I learned was how powerful the press can be.  Very early on we were covered by The Oprah Winfrey Show.  We didn’t even have a website (back then only a few select “splash” pages existed), but since then I have learned to prepare and take advantage of press opportunities.

7. Open question: You decide what to ask and then answer it yourself. Toot your own horn here!! What advice would you give? Being an entrepreneur is all about execution.  Anyone can talk about things but the ability to “do” or get something done is invaluable and what sets us apart.

8. What would you tell others about starting their own business? Get really good at writing to do lists and rewriting them in the same day.  Every day I make them and cross things off.  First you look down and think, OMG, how am I going to accomplish all of this, but take one item at a time and by the end of the day you will be moving items up and reorganizing.  By the end of the month you will have a book of things you have done and can feel like you are still moving forward.

9. What do you wish you had learned at home or in school (High school, college)? A heads up on how much paperwork there is in doing things “on your own.”  No, well there is but honestly I think I was the type of person who tried to learn as much as I could in all settings so no regrets. I had wonderful family who in the very beginning would host “board meetings” at our dinner table.

10. Any last questions/comments? Read about our 2011 Glammy Award Winner.

BIO: Rachel Doyle, is the president and founder of GlamourGals Foundation with over a decade of entrepreneurial and management expertise.  She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the first-ever Cosmogirl of the Year, Fun-Fearless Female Finalist by Cosmopolitan Magazine and the Cornell University College of Human Ecology Young Alumni Award.  Her work has not gone unnoticed and has been featured in hundreds of press outlets including The Oprah Winfrey Show, The New York Times and two text books.

www.GlamourGals.org

Facebook.com/glamourgals

@glamourgals

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