How They've Made Millions

Four women who turned their spare cash into multimillion-dollar companies

It's the big ideas that make the big bucks - flashes of inspiration that can lead to financial freedom. And when the light bulb appears, life is never the same again. But how do you turn the eureka moment into a profitable business? These four incredible entrepreneurs spill the secrets of their success.

Marsha Serlin
Founder and President of United Scrap Metal

Marsha Serlin's business started on the scrap heap, and it hasn't moved since. And why should it? Her company, United Scrap Metal, has grown from an initial investment of $200 and a Budget truck she rented using her Sears card, to one of Chicago's fastest growing and biggest recyclers with annual revenues exceding $200 million. She has picked up numerous awards, including the National Small Business Subcontractor of the Year, and is the first woman in the U.S. to found a scrap metal company. And along the way she has made a very tidy sum indeed.

It started with a mentor

Serlin's rags to riches story starts in 1978 when her house and car were repossessed, her husband walked out, and she was left with hardly any money to raise her children. Previously she had discovered that one of her neighbors was in the scrap metal business, and decided that if she ever needed money, that was the business she would go into. Now was that time, so she asked him, "Teach me everything you know in 24 hours." He became her mentor, and she fired hundreds of questions at him.

United was not an overnight success, and Serlin worked hard for her achievements. They did not come easily. The entrepreneur started her business by knocking on the doors of firms that might have scrap metal to sell, and she searched the back alleys of Chicago for any metallic waste. What she collected, she sold to bigger dealers. Her motivation was survival - she needed money to pay the bills and feed the kids. She worked long hours every day of the week.

Busting the boys' club

Serlin was determined to make United a success, and ignored the skepticism and naysayers who predicted that a woman couldn't succeed in a traditional male-dominated industry. When she drove into scrap yards, men would stop, stare, and smirk as she loaded her truck. They assumed she wasn't going to last, but this only spurred her on even more. Serline believed that she could do anything she wanted to, once commenting, "I never knew I had a limit." Her competitors under estimated her drive and ambition, which allowed her to slip under their radar.

When the business started to pick up, she was able to move out of her garage and buy an old crumbling building on a small plot of land. And she deliberately kept the exterior dingy so her competitors would not know how well she was doing. Meanwhile she tastefully and beautifully decorated her office and proceeded to buy all the property behind her. Today she owns more than 35 acres and employs 200 people, and the company recycles hundreds of materials including metal, wood, paper, and plastics.

Willing to do the work

The scrap metal maven's company has enjoyed rapid growth during the 31 years of its existence, and Serlin knows exactly why. She believes her success has come from sheer hard work and putting in the hours, to ensure that she offers her customers a better service than that offered by the comptition. It's also been about reinvention, staying ahead of the game, and reacting faster than everyone else. These are qualities that have become increasingly important during the tough economic climate, when manufacturers are making fewer products and therefore don't use as much metal as in previous years.

"No excuses" paid off

Serlin's millions have made their way into her bank account because she thinks big, and is not afraid to fail - as long as there are more wins than losses. Her personal motto is "just do it," and she says she was using it long before Nika adopted the mantra. "No conversation, no excuses. If you're swift, everything seems to work better," she told Entrepreneur magazine. "When yoiu belabor something, it just doesn't work."

Bonnie Kelly & Teresa Walsh
Cofounders of Silpada Designs

How do you take a mere $50 and turn it into a multimillion-dollar company with more than 3 million customers? Just ask Bonnie Kelly and Teresa Walsh. They first met in 1985 when the oldest of each of their children started first grade. After chatting about how they both could make a little extra cash, they hit upon the bright idea of pursuing their passion for making jewelry. They were stay-at-home moms and wanted a business that didn't take them too far from their front doors. With both of the husbands temporarily unemployed, times were tough, but Kelly and Walsh made the decision to take $25 each from their grocery funds to buy some jewelry from a Kansas City area jewelry manufacturer, which they sold.

No experience? No problem.

The dynamic duo then started to design their own jewlery and throw parties to sell their new creations. Despite having no background in sales, they were an instant success. The key was having fun, just a few girls getting together to try on some jewelry, and there were no high-pressure sales tactics. Eventually Kelly and Walsh were doing about 150-200 parties a year, and earning between $100,000 and $150,000 in sales. All the while they were reinvesting their money in their company until they could afford to sell just sterling. However, as much as they were having a ball, the parties were labor intensive and exhausting - they didn't have a catalog, and so they were bringing all their merchandise to each party. Making an executive decision, the pair decided they had only two choices - quit or get bigger. Quitting was never really an option, so they took a leap of faith and planned on how they would grow their business.

Instrumental in what happened next was the fact that they were constantly being asked, "How can we get your job?" They never had an answer. And that's what prompted them to come up with the party-plan idea, with independent representatives seling their jewelry lines. The two women and their husbands knew they were sitting on something exciting, so they designed a business model and created a cataog.

These were nervous times, and they were taking a big risk by going from what was really a part-time job to a full-time business. Kelly's husband, Jerry, quit his job to come on board, and the couple took out a second mortgage to invest in the new company. Walsh and her husband sold stock. Though concerned about what they had let themselves in for, Kelly and Walsh were fueled by their enthusiasm for sterling silver jewelry. And they believed in themselves.

Word-of-mouth worked

Silpada grew through word-of-mouth. In 1997, they were working out of the basement of one of their homes with 14 sales representatives. But by the end of the 2001, their sales revenues had jumped from $1 million to $3 million. However, this presented huge logistical problems which they had to sort out if the were to grow any bigger.

The company had doubled its growth every month, but Kelly and Walsh were not prepared for it. They did not offer online ordering, and there were two-hour waits to get through to customer service representatives. In time they caught up with their ordesr and formed a plan to stay ahead of growth by creating an infrastructure to support it. They moved into a new building, hired 22 people, and put the software in place. And their growth has been phenomenal ever since.

Dazzling success

In 2004, retail sales exceeded $50 million, and by 2008 the annual figure had shot up to nearly $280 million. Today, there are more than 28,000 representatives across the country and a corporate headquarters and distribution center in Lenexa, Kansas. Their love of jewelry is matched by a desire to empower their own successful careers and attain financial freedom.

Kelly and Walsh succeeded because they were prepared to take risks and because they knew that their company could be as big as their dreams allowed. They have demonstrated that it is entirely possible to do something you love and make millions.

Eileen Gittins
Founder and President of Blurb.com

Once upon a time there was a photographer and serial entrepreneur who found herself between jobs after the crash of the dot.com boom. With time on her hands, she gave herself a project of snapping and interviewing former colleagues. Out of the adventure energed a multimillion-dollar idea and a highly profitable company that has turned out to be the most exciting chapter in Eileen Gittins' career.

At the end of the project Gittins had amassed some great shots and incredible stories, and was thinking of a way to say thank you to her photographic subjects. Her first instinct was to create a website, but she quickly ruled it out because it didn't feel right as a gift. That's when she hit upon the idea of creating a book. Gittins knew that self-publishing was expensive, time-consuming, and hard to do, but she was fired up with a fervor to create a model where anyone could make a professional-quality book - to give as a gift or sell and market online.

A riveting read

So she created Blurb.com, a creative publishing service that believes you don't need deep pockets or friends in high places to get a book published. It's a marriage of e-commerce, print-on-demand technology, and desktop publishng, and the tough nut that Gittins had to crack was to work out how to become profitable from the printing of just one book.

The hi-tech bookworm operates a 360-degree approach to her ideas, and always asks herself tough questions to see if something will work. It's the only way to spot objections and potential pitfalls, and with Blurb.com there were three that she needed to iron out if the company were to have a chance of making it. The first issue was that she simply had to come up with a way of being able to print books efficiently so that every item could make money. Secondly, she wondered if she really was the only person in the universe to have thought of this idea. And finally, Gittins worried that she might go to jail over copyright issues. Sos she had a good ideabut it couldn't become a great business until she sorted out these problems.

Her talking paid off

Her way of tackling the issues was to talk to everyone who would listen. Now, in business there is a school of thought that says you shouldn't talk to anyone about your ideas lest they steal them from you. Gittins doesn't subscribe to this viewpoint, thinking that it's not so much about the nub of the idea as how it is executed. She believes that talking widely is good business sense, because you never know what ideas people might have or whom they might know. So she talked to people on planes, on buses, and at parties. She got community groups together, and in so doing was able to hook up with printers and people in the publishing world. She spoke with them about the economics because a bestseller, and then approached software companies to find out how to build the application.

The end result is super savvy piece of downloadable software called Booksmart, a completely user-friendly way of controlling the design and layout of books. With all problems fixed, the company formed in 2005, and by the end of its first operational year Blurb.com had raked in $1 million. Gittins started making a profit during the second year, and within 24 months the revenue had skyrocketed to $30 million. During 2008 the company produced almost 1 million books. Blurb.com has not spent a dime on advertising - customers come via the blogosphere and word-of-mouth.

Switched on and tuned in

Gittins believes that one of the keys to her success is being a pattern recognizer who makes her own luck. What she means by this is that her radar is constantly trawling what's going on around her at all times. It's both a conscious and an unconscious process wherein she is constantly tuning in and looking for trends, new markets, talent, people, and opportunities. She is always switched on. So from an observer's point of view, it may look like she hit upon a lucky streak by creating a company at the right time with the right idea, but in reality it's part of a long and continuous process that involves being observant at all times.

Another key element that has helped Gittins to make her millions is that she is doing something she loves, a concept she feels every entrepreneur should have. "Be authentic and do something you love," she told and interviewer on Dutch television. "If you don't love it, do something else you love. Because it is hard to build a company, but it is tremendously rewarding if it is something that is personally gratifying to you." -P.A.

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