TRUST…

IT BUILDS AND BLESSES YOUR BUSINESS

Growing up with a bevy of amazing friends and neighbors, they quickly became my family and those same people are still my friends today. 

Throughout the years and even now as I type this post, there were and still are certain family members I knew I could always trust.

THEY TAUGHT ME WELL…MY PARENTS

One valuable lesson that I learned as a very young child was the one my parents taught me through their actions. Looking back through the journey of my phenomenal childhood was this; God placed my parents right in the center of Oxford Street to be a true and life long blessing to my neighbors and their children.

THIS IS HOW I BUILT MY BUSINESS

My neighbors trusted and loved my parents because of their honesty and sincerity. They trusted my parents wholeheartedly because my mother and father were beacons of light who had an open heart policy that came from the bosom of God our Father. I believe my parents had been conformed to the likeness of Christ long before I was ever even thought of. What a blessing for me. I also believe, because of my parents obedience and servant hood, that God richly blessed our lives beyond measure. That book shall be written. 

And so as I have gotten older I would like to think and know that people trust me and the products and service I offer and provide. I like to think that my products are life-changing, inspiring and uplifting.

I also believe that I give excellent reasons for my customers to trust me. For example, I am the owner of Cyndi’s Light Work Designs. When I started my business and penned my intro page I wrote my message to my audience from my heart and so it is that when people visit my website and read my message they hear a sincere voice behind that message.

Brief and to the point I tried to make my voice clear, my designs heartwarming and life-altering, with some of my masterpieces being accompanied by poems or words.  Many of my designs need no wording at all for the design alone speaks for itself. 

How can you build impacting life long business relationships and trust with your customers or clients. 

• Be honest
• Make them your focus by offering a need or a solution to their problem that gets the results they need which is why they came to you in the first place because they trust you!
  
• Let them know you care by taking time to listen to and hear their heart. Be patient and be attentive.
  
• Follow up with a message of thanksgiving to them and God.

Also, when you implement God’s principles into your business, people will surely see and recognize that there is something so very special about you and your business.  There is a uniqueness that shines and illumines bright and brilliant in you and your business. Don’t ever stop doing what you’re doing. You were created to be a woman of excellence! 

Cynthia

Good Evening Entrepreneurs,

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post.  I do apologize. 

I have a lot I want to share and thought I would do it now as I have been in deep thought for some time now. 

I was caregiver to my mother off and on for 16 years.  During the last five and a half years I became her permanent caregiver.  With her being bed-bound I had to bathe and change her diaper three times or more a day.  I like to think that I cared for my mother with all my might and strength giving her all the love and compassion that God had bestowed upon me.  It was very difficult at times; not just for her, but for me and my family.  I drew my strength from the love and compassion that I felt for my dear mother.  My heart truly went out to her and for her which is why I just could not bring myself to put her in a nursing home.  Although I had no help from my siblings, I didn’t complain, but at times I was completely worn out, but I had to keep going and I did.  I did it for her because she deserved it.

Love for the Woman I’ve Always Called Mommy Regardless of My Age; True Love

I remember my cousin saying to me, “Cyn, you give Towne (my mother’s nickname) too many choices when it comes to making her breakfast because most people would say, this is what you’re going to eat and that’s that!”.  I felt like this; my mother gave me the best of her when I was growing up.  The best care; amazing meals and an abundance of love and so much more.  It’s because of her that I am an outstanding speller.  It’s because of my mother and father that I know nothing but truth and true love.  Even when people wrong me and then turn around and ask me for money, I still open my heart to share my wealth.  My mother and father were just the greatest parents on this planet. 

They shared everything they had with me and my siblings; I would have to write a book to explain what I mean by this so I will just say they were love in every sense of the word.  In the neighborhood where I grew up, we were all family, every single person on Oxford, Nassau and Jefferson Streets adored Towne and Bud/Mary and Vernon.  There was something special and different about our home so when my mother could no longer stay in her home alone, I brought her here to my home with open arms and a loving heart.  Any child would I would like to think. 

During my mother’s stay with me, I would always go and sit in her room with her throughout the day and listen to her tell me stories about her childhood and many stories there were.  Because my days were her days, I could not run all of my businesses the way they needed to be run, but that was just fine because I figured if this is God’s plan for me right now, caring for my mother, I would do so wholeheartedly.  I knew that it was important for me to obey God’s calling and do it willingly and happily.  I so desperately wanted my mother to be comfortable, warm and full, and I believe she was.

Gone, But Always With Me

On September 15th at 12:45 a.m., the Holy Spirit woke me up, as sleepy as I was, and He told me to go and check on my mother.  I turned on the hall light which was always more than enough to see/look at her without putting on the light in her room and waking her up out of a deep good sleep.  Well, when I turned on the hall light, I looked at her and I saw that she wasn’t breathing.  I called my sons who were in the family room and I said, “I think Memom is gone!” They were up the steps in one big leap asking me if I was sure.  I said, “Yes; she’s gone.  I then woke up my husband, Bill, and told him.  I was relieved and heartbroken at the same time. Relieved that she was no longer in pain and heartbroken that she was no longer with me and my family.  She had become my fifth child and I was elated to be able to care for her almost as well as she had taken care of me, my sister and three brothers. I cried and cried the next day, truly troubled, devastated and heartbroken to say the least. 

And now here I am free to run my businesses without interruptions, but my on my how I miss those special interruptions that took up a large chunk of my life.  I miss my mother.  I love her deeply and dearly.  I will always love her.  When she developed bedsores I never gave up trying desperately to mend and rid her of that awful pain that accompanied those terrible sores.

And so it is that I write this post to tell you that in business or anything that pertains to the happiness, peace and contentment in your life and anything that pertains to your business, don’t ever give up. 

Be blessed.

Cynthia

Your Brilliant Brand

Put Your Brand On the Shelf.

When you go to the supermarket you see a large variety of products stocked on shelves. This is how companies/manufacturersy display their own brand.

When you shop, lets say for ketchup, you’ll notice that there is always one or perhaps two brands that standout from the others.  These brands are usually the most popular who make the same kind of product, merchandise or item. This could easily be you. Just because a market may be saturated with the same product or service you may offer or provide doesn’t mean that it/you can’t be the very best.   

Whatever your product ensure that you do whatever necessary to make sure that it stands out from the rest.  Here’s how you can be sure that your product prospers and your business soars. 

Your Entrepreneurial Spirit

Your entrepreneurial spirit of discernment has you on a profound life prospering journey. 

Deep within you have superior quality, rare and priceless life building and sustaining principles that have given you a true sense of what it means to do business God’s way. 

When you accept, embrace and incorporate God’s formula to establish your brand it sets in motion and propels you to remarkable long term success. 

As entrepreneurs it is important that you recognize the fact that there is so much more to business than marketing, keeping your eye on the competition, etc. 

We understand the daily routine of speaking to and on social media; Facebook, Twitter, IG and so on, but in order to be truly successful and enjoy God’s very best in business as well as in your life we must always remember to:

• Put God first keeping Him
• Uppermost in your thoughts
• Pray with a sincere and thankful heart giving God honor and glory
• Begin each day asking God for leadership, guidance and direction for your life that will pour over and into every ounce of your business
• Wait and Listen for God to speak before you delve into building your empire because without Him there would be no empire
• Thank Him throughout your day everyday for His infinite wisdom and wise counsel
• Thank the Lord for all that He will reveal to you as He moves to show you His perfect plan and will for your life and your business 
• Honor Him by obeying and heeding His Word. 

Let your entrepreneur light shine and illuminate every aspect of your business. You have the greatest most phenomenal ability to simply be magnificent in business.

Enjoy your journey. 

Cynthia

Time Is One of The Most Important Factors

In the Lives of Entrepreneurs

Time is the one thing that we cannot get back.  It is essential that you, as an entrepreneur, use your time intelligently.

Managing your time wisely is conducive to your success in business.

If you have been trying to manage your time in a manner that can be less stressful and you feel like you haven’t accomplished this goal, then let’s see how  you can manage your time and your business.

Here’s a small, but big list of what you can do to help you to manage your time in such a way that you feel you are getting things done in a timely and professional manner.

1. When you wake up in the morning the first thing you should do is to give God an abundance of thanksgiving from the heart.
2. Spend time reading, studying and meditating upon the Word of God. 
3. Pray prayers of glory giving God all the glory He alone so richly deserves.
4. Speak your daily affirmations over yourself and drop nuggets of encouragement right into your business.
5. Write your daily to do list in your daily to do book. (if you don’t have one then you can create or buy one; or you can use 3×5 cards)
6. Check and answer all pertinent emails.
7. Enter into your office and get excited for the lessons you will learn, the lessons you will learn and for the money you will make. 

Remember, as you manage your time, it is important for you to stay in a positive frame of mind and always work in faith knowing that God is going to bless all of your endeavors. 

Always be brilliant in business because that’s who you are!

Cynthia G. Boyer

This Founder Has a 5-Minute Secret Weapon

That Helps Her Focus Every Day

Four years ago, Shan-Lyn Ma came up with the idea for her wedding planning and registry company Zola when it felt like all of her friends were getting married.

Every time she had to navigate a wedding registry to pick out a gift, instead of excitement for the upcoming event, all she felt was irritation. “It was one of the worst ecommerce experiences I had ever had,” Ma recalled.

The Australian native knows a thing or two about creating successful ecommerce experiences. Before she co-founded Zola, Ma was the chief product officer of fashion and jewelry retailer Chloe + Isabel.

Prior to that, she was the senior director of product management at Gilt Groupe, where she helped develop the core site experience for the flash sale platform as well as all of the mobile web experiences. She was also the creator of Gilt Taste, the company’s food and wine division.

Since Zola’s launch in 2013, the company has helped more than 300,000 couples set up their wedding registries and the business carries over 450 brands. In the spring of this year, Ma and her team debuted Zola Weddings, a collection of wedding planning tools to make websites, manage guest lists and create customizable checklists.

For Ma, customer experience is her top priority. “[Zola Weddings] was created because we heard our couples ask us if we could build these things for them. We built it to serve them in more ways.”

We caught up with Ma and asked her 20 questions to figure out what makes her tick.

1. How do you start your day?
I start by taking my dog out for a walk, and I do The Five Minute Journal [inspirational journal], 10 minutes of meditation and then I think about the top three things I want to move forward at work that day. It helps me focus throughout the rest of the day and not be as stressed out about the hundreds of things I have to do.

2. How do you end your day?
I do The Five Minute Journal again, do some reading before bed and take my dog out. I found that The Five Minute Journal in particular helps me because even if there were 95 things that I didn’t get done, there were some things I was able to push forward, and it reminds me that it was a good, productive day.

3. What’s a book that changed your mind and why?
The book I’m reading right now is Merchant Princes by Leon Harris. It’s about the families that built the great department stores. It’s interesting to me because I’ve been thinking a lot about how the traditional department stores are struggling to survive. My thinking was that they hadn’t innovated in a while and that’s why they were struggling. “But what the book showed me was that they have endured so many retail trends over so many decades, and what’s amazing is that they survived for as long as they have.”  It reinforced for me that retail and ecommerce always come back to the same principles: selection, convenience and price.

4. What’s a book you always recommend and why?
My favorite book is called Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan. I love this book and have read it many times over the years. It really helps you understand how to take something from an idea to then test it and verify it as something that customers will want to use. And then how do you actually bring it to scale and work with a team to continue to develop that product and move it forward.

5. What’s a strategy to keep focused?
Nothing beats the simple to-do list and checking off boxes.

Related: Tory Burch Says Inspiring Entrepreneurs Share These 3 Qualities

6. When you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be like Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo. I wanted to be the founder of a company that shaped the world and had a big impact. Just the fact that he came up with the idea to catalog the worldwide web and give everyone access to the internet in a way that was fun and irreverent was something that moved me. It was the reason why I moved to Silicon Valley, went to business school and chose to work at Yahoo for my first job in the United States.

7. What did you learn from the worst boss you ever had?
The worst boss I ever had took a piece of work that I had done, which I knew I hadn’t delivered my best on, and complimented it as a great piece of work. The result of him accepting and rewarding what I knew to be substandard work made me no longer want to work with him. I knew I wasn’t going to be pushed to be better. “My lesson from that is when I lead people, I push them. I think if you’re not challenging your team to do better, you are doing them a disservice.”

8. Who has influenced you most when it comes to how you approach your work?
I have been fortunate to work with Kevin Ryan, who is a great New York serial entrepreneur. I learned from him the importance of hiring great people, letting them run their own functional business and pushing them harder when needed.

9. What’s a trip that changed you?
I immigrated to three different countries. Every one of those was life changing, but I would say my move from Australia where I grew up to Silicon Valley to go to business school. It changed my worldview about what I thought I could be, what I wanted to be. It made dreaming big feel really possible. It felt like, why shouldn’t I be able to go out and start a company like Yahoo?

10. What inspires you?
I am a bit of an ecommerce nerd. The things I get inspired by are people and companies that are rethinking ecommerce in new ways. For example, Stitch Fix and the founder Katrina Lake. I think she is inspiring in the way that she is rethinking how people understand fashion.

Marc Lore who founded Jet and sold it to Walmart. He is inspiring in that he is taking one of the biggest retail giants of all time [in Amazon].

At Zola, we’re constantly thinking about how we can reinvent ecommerce for our customers, millennial couples who are in the process of getting married. We look at these examples of companies who have done it other spaces and think about how we can apply it to weddings and wedding registries.

11. What was your first business idea and what did you do with it?
In high school I got to do a small-business activity, where we would form teams and come up with an idea, put it together and sell it. We came up with an idea for a stress-relief kit. We would fill balloons with rice to make stress balls. What was great about the activity was these teams were competing against each other to see who could generate the most business out of their idea. We were the first in our city, and I think also our state. A lot of it came down to sales. I found that I was able to drive the most sales for my team, because I was willing to stay out longer than anyone else to keep selling, and winning was something I found I loved.

12. What was an early job that taught you something important or useful?
When I was young I decided that I would spend part of a summer building a vegetable garden in the backyard. A lot of the soil in that part of Australia is clay and hard to dig, so I was basically digging concrete. Everyone told me that it couldn’t be done. I ended up digging for the whole summer, all day long for hours to show everyone that it could be done. And at the end of the summer I had a garden.

13. What’s the best advice you ever took?
The best piece of advice is the same as some of the worst piece of advice. I learned it from a favorite lecturer at business school. The advice is: the only thing that matters in startups is product market fit. Now that I’ve had a few years to think about it, what makes it great advice is that if you don’t have it, nothing else matters — you essentially don’t have a company. But once you have it, you need to keep pushing to make sure that you are building a company on top of that foundation of a product market fit..

In my current role, in the first two years of the business, we could see very clearly that we had product market fit. We had a service that people loved and told their friends about. We had explosive organic growth and that was the foundation. What we’ve spent the last few years doing is scaling and growing the business based on what we are hearing from our customers, what they are telling us they would like to see us grow into and making sure it’s sustainable over the long run.

14. What’s the worst piece of advice you ever got?
The reason why I think the [above] advice sometimes does a disservice to entrepreneurs stems from my experience when I was at Gilt Groupe. I think we did have a product that people loved, and it grew really quickly. But that underlying business model was very challenging for Gilt. It required thousands of people that made it really tough to sustain. I think that was a great example that product-market fit isn’t sufficient.

15. What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Coffee. It’s the main thing that keeps me productive — not too much, not too little.

16. Is there an app or tool you use in a surprising way to get things done or stay on track?
I’ve tried a number of different tools and hacks, but I keep on coming back to the simple to-do list.

17. What does work-life balance mean to you?
To know oneself, what works for you and to stay true to that. I’m someone that likes to be on top of my work, so I’m not the kind of person who can tune out for an entire weekend or a whole vacation; I find that more stressful. I prefer to check in and respond regularly — that makes me feel less stressed out than if things are piling up.

18. How do you prevent burnout?
I am a big fan of sleep. I think of weekends as a prime time to catch up on sleep. It’s a luxury that helps me stay sane.

19. When you’re faced with a creativity block, what’s your strategy to get innovating?
I love to walk near water. As someone who grew up in Sydney, a city surrounded by water, it’s something I miss. Now I make an effort to walk somewhere near water whenever I feel like I am facing a hard problem that I have to think creatively about.

20. What are you learning now?
Every day I’m learning more about leading a fast-paced tech startup. I’ve learned the most from the many experiments we run within every function every day. We’re all learning together. I used to think the great startups knew what they were doing and there were playbooks you could apply. I’m realizing that every situation is so different based on industry, people and timing. You need to test all the hypotheses and see what works for your particular case.