A Special 15-Candled Cupcake For Honoring My Personal Heros
Greetings *|FNAME|*,
During our 6-week residency in Houston for my daily cancer radiation treatments, Paul and I decided to further explore and enjoy the city as much as we could over this extended stay. A few weeks ago we were in the central Rice Village area, and discovered a a fantastic cupcake shop called Sprinkles, which delivers the best cupcakes I have ever had. Curious to learn more, I did some background research on the company.
Back in 2004, investment banker Candace Nelson looked at the few cupcake offerings in the market and asked herself – why can't we elevate the lowly cupcake to a daily treat? She changed her focus, put in a lot of hard work, and persevered despite challenges to open Sprinkles in Beverly Hills. Word spread quickly with a little help. Barbara Streisand tried out the cupcakes and sent a box to Oprah. Eight months later, Harpo Studios called asking for 300 cupcakes for the next day at the Breakfast with Oprah event. Despite the last-minute notice, Candace and her husband Charles made it happen and achieved instant familiarity for the Sprinkles company. Decisiveness, persistence, and adaptation paid off. Now, Sprinkles even has an innovative cupcake ATM, which Paul and tried out recently. And because tomorrow is March 17th, I will especially appreciate Candace and Charle's entrepreneurial spirit when I mark Change by Design's 15th anniversary of being in business.
Fifteen years ago, I faced substantial student loan debt with a recent Ph.D. degree in hand. I wasn't pursuing work in academia, or high-powered consulting work that had 75% or more travel, because I wanted to give my fairly new marriage a chance to thrive. Weighing my options, I decided to go for broke and hang out my Change by Design shingle. I knew I would offer quality instructional design and performance improvement products, which could financially sustain us. But little did I know what it would take to be an effective entrepreneur and a solid businesswoman. I didn't know what I didn't know, but was willing to learn and grow. As a result, I've established my own brand, built a book of business which is growing by leaps and bounds, and am excited about the next fifteen years ahead.
So where did that entrepreneurial spirit come from? Or the optimism in the face of daunting odds, as well as that determination to work hard and persist? I've talked a lot about self-efficacy here in the past, but who do you learn it from? There are many, many people who have contributed to Change by Design's success, but four very special heros were pivotal in my evolution.
When I was 10, my mom married my stepfather, Carl O. Fremberg. Although he soon died of a massive heart attack when I was in college, the 9 years we spent together were formative and lasting. Our most memorable bonding activity during my pre-teen years was heavy manual labor on the 2.5 acre family homestead just outside of Orlando. Carl, my mom, my younger brother and I cleared palmettos, dug wells and septic tank fields, built a barn and fenced it in, built an A-Frame and then doubled its size, and also kept horses.
As my brother and I entered teenagehood, we desperately wanted to stay at home on Merritt Island on weekends so we could enjoy time with friends. But family bonding just moved closer...when the four of us doubled the size of our home, including building a second story and a circular staircase. I hauled cinder bricks, carried sheet rock and plywood sheets, hammered nails, helped build and install prefab walls, dug foundations and painted walls. It didn't matter that I was a girl, and there weren't sick days. I just had to get outside to work in the Florida heat and tough it out, because we didn't get any outs. The norm in my stepfather's home was hard work, so at a young age, I naturally obtained the sticktoitiveness and work ethic necessary to become an entrepreneur. We entrepreneurs have to make things happen, often through incredibly long hours early on, because we are turning visions into reality. That's regardless of whether things or BAU, or when there's a Great Recession just 6 months after getting our state of Florida business license.
Hero #2 is Dr. Constance C. Bergquist. I had a very brief stint as a stay-at-home-mom after my sons were born, and then had to return to the workplace. Based on my background, Connie took a chance and hired me in the 1980s as her office manager at Evaluation Systems Design (ESDI), where a bevy of exceptional Ph.D. evaluators worked. I oversaw a staff of eight to make sure everything got done. In-between work, we had a lot of fun, eating together on beautiful corporate china after our quarterly gourmet meal cooking (team-building) activity. Connie was brilliant, kind and loved to share fun with others, so she would frequently host us at her lovely home for celebrations. Most importantly, ESDI ran on funded proposal responses to RFPs, so I learned first-hand what it took to determine project pricing and produce a winning proposal response. It taught me the adage "You eat what you kill." After that experience, when later facing what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I envisioned becoming a businesswoman like Connie and doing similar work to her team of consultants. This led to my eventually returning to school for my Master's and Ph.D. in a closely-related field. It also gave me the confidence to open Change by Design in 2008. And Connie taught me how important it is to pick and develop a strong team who consistently is able to perform their best work.
The brilliant Dr. Albert Bandura is hero #3, as well as being a Stanford psychology theorist whose deep work in social cognitive theory, observational (social) learning, and self-efficacy theory centrally informed my Ph.D. dissertation research. Dr. Bandura quantified "confidence" (the belief in one's able to do something specific), which resonated with me in my life's path. It also nurtured my tendency towards build highly-effective training and performance improvement solutions for various clients. My dissertation about how we socially learn from, relate to, and are influenced by avatars (compared to human beings) on the road to building learner self-efficacy was informed by various Bandura-outlined techniques. He provided critical guidelines on how to improve self-efficacy in others, which I modeled in the training I designed and developed. Ultimately, Dr. Bandura's work made me highly capable as a consultant because of this foundational perspective through which I viewed and addressed all projects we have underwent at Change by Design.
I credit one additional hero with helping me improve my entreneurship and business saavy, because life is more than just working hard, working smart, and producing high quality products. That would be my business coach, Elizabeth Barbour, who has kept saying for the last 6 years that self-care would lead to more business... and she was right. Her experience and deep intuition helped me refine my business planning and execution acumen. And she has been an expert guide through several entrepreneurial inclinations, serving as a role model for the businesswoman I am today. Elizabeth has steered me in directions that I could not see and has always been in my corner, even during dark or challenging times when I needed greater inspiration. With Elizabeth, the well has never ran dry.
It's incredible how many lessons I've learned over the past 15 years while building Change by Design. This Friday, I will be reflecting on these four heroic influences in my personal and professional life. Additionally, I'm grateful to so many of you for helping sustain me during the past year with Cancer, but cannot in this short newsletter list everyone. If you are willing, I'd encourage you to take a moment to think about someone who is a personal hero in your life, and consider letting them know how much they've impacted you. We all have much to celebrate!
Honorably yours,
Sue
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