I Have A Book Idea, But It's Not Mine To Write
My Book Idea
I have a book idea. Doesn’t everyone? But the problem is it’s not my book to write. The story would be told by this CEO, who grew five thousand dollars into more than a billion dollars. No, it’s not Charlie Monger or Warren Buffet, who have many books written about them.
The Author of Not-My-Book
With $5,000, she built a mega business, becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire in history. The author of this book would be Sara Blakely, creator of Spanx, a shapewear brand made by and for women.
“I did not have the most experience in the industry or the most money, but I cared the most.”
Image Credit: Ben Rollins
Why Her?
Selling fax machines door-to-door, one morning as she got dressed, she cut her pantyhose and substituted them for her underwear. Sara recognized an opportunity to solve a real problem for women, needing flattering hosiery to wear underneath clothes with open-toed shoes. With women driving 70-80% of consumer purchases, and men dominating CEO positions at female-focused companies like Victoria’s Secret, she was uniquely positioned to deeply understand the problem and how to fix it.
She didn’t graduate from an Ivy League school and doesn’t carry an MBA, yet she’s put into practice what those graduates dream about doing.
She’s a model for women who want to be CEOs, when there aren’t enough of them given the corporate pipeline for women representation in CEO positions is only 19%.
She is funny: "I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying," she told the New Yorker.
And, selfishly, I’m eager to understand how Sara built a billionaire-dollar empire without sipping a single cup of coffee.
Sara’s hosiery and shapewear problem wasn’t unique. In fact it made her one of millions of customers for her now product line, but she was pivotal in taking an everyday problem and growing it into empire using a scrappy and creative mindset. Sara boasts an admirable, varied, and novel toolkit, which is why I've chosen to her to write, well, her own book.
The Outline
At the risk of sounding preposterous, I’ve come up with the outline for her book. Sara is busy, after all. She’s running Spanx, her foundation, giving away half of her wealth to the Bill Gates & Melinda Gates foundation, and raising four kids.
“Believe in your idea, trust your instincts, and don’t be afraid to fail. It took me two years from the time I had the idea for Spanx until the time I had a product in hand ready to sell into stores.”
Get Scrappy
Gaining from the stressors of going without external funding or having all of the answers before moving forward, Sara created antifragility in her business which helped it survive the chaos of an early startup. She practiced committing when you don’t have all of the answers, like securing her Neiman Marcus deal without having a solution for how to mass produce “crotches” for the product.
“I’ve never sewn, I have never taken a business class in my life, I didn’t have anybody in the industry or even know anybody who worked in fashion or retail.”
Harvard Business Review claims young people are seemingly internalizing a pre-eminent contemporary myth that things, including themselves, should be perfect. Sara was not a perfectionist and didn’t fear failure which enabled her to make decisions in the face of ambiguity. She even schedules “oops meetings” at Spanx where employees stand up and say how they messed up or a mistake they made, usually turning it into a funny story. “If you can create a culture where [your employees] are not terrified to fail or make a mistake, then they’re going to be highly productive and more innovative,” she says in an interview with Stanford, “I’m curious about the things that hold power over us. And one is fear of embarrassment. We all have that. But if I embarrass myself, then it loses its power over me.” According to a quote from Inc, she learned about the importance of failure from her father asking the family “what did you guys fail at this week?” which helped her in not postponing difficult tasks.
Be vulnerable
She is someone who was told no “a thousand times.” She failed the LSAT, studied hard, and failed again. Vulnerable stories like this need to be told. As Dr. Brené Brown says, “The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you.” With the rise of treating our experiences as performances to be praised on social media, Sara is forthcoming about her vulnerabilities, dissolving the notion of perfectionism. In her Stanford interview, she said “When I started Spanx, instead of talking at my customer, I wanted to talk to them. I felt other companies were like, ‘We need to be perfect, and you need to see us as the authority. That’s how we’re going to sell you a product.’ They weren’t really talking to me, and I didn’t necessarily trust them. [Instead], I made myself vulnerable. I was like, ‘Hey, I’m one of you. Here’s what it does for me. This is why it works.’ I used my own butt in the before and after picture. And I felt like customers became really connected and loyal.””
Own it
Women-led businesses. There aren’t enough of them. According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group, for every dollar of funding, startups founded by women generate 78 cents, while startups founded by men generated less than half, at only 31 cents. Sara proved her business model early on, but she was intentional. Keeping her idea under wraps for a year, she waited to share the idea until she was fully committed to building the company in her spare time. Lacking what typical investors might say was a credible background, a manufacturer was convinced to work with her only after sharing the idea with his daughters who said, “it’s brilliant!”
She understood that 100% is easier than 98% and as Ben Hardy teaches us in his book, Willpower Doesn’t Work, putting your resources into your desires creates an environment that is conducive to meeting your goals instead of mustering the courage to do things each day to meet them. Sara agreed to partnerships before the product was ready because she knew that level of deep commitment would fuel her drive to finish producing it.
Courtesy of Bauce Mag
Get creative
She’s admitted to driving a fake commute because she’s identified that’s where her best thinking happens, according to the Masters of Scale podcast interview. She drives around aimlessly in Atlanta to provide space for creative thinking. Creativity leads to unconventional ideas, which are the center of innovation. This has led Spanx to expand from shapewear to fashionable, flattering jeans and activewear and menswear. It’s how she landed on the catchy name, Spanx, which was inspired by George Eastman who used two K’s in Kodak because "it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.” Sara twisted this notion further and changed the “k” to an “x” to further differentiate the company, and easily register the Spanx trademark.
"If you’re an asshole, you become a bigger asshole. If you’re nice, you become nicer. Money is fun to make, fun to spend and fun to give away."
We Need This Book
Sara Blakely needs to gift us with her wisdom to inspire all of the future and current female entrepreneurs. We want this, Sara! I’ll leave it to her to fill in the details of her experience and title her book, but I’ll throw in my submission: “Shaping Spanx Into a Billion-Dollar Company”.
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