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Do you want to make more money? There are two ways to increase revenue in your business: You can sell to more customers, or you can sell more to your customers. At Admiral Road, for example, that means we can grow the company by selling blankets to more people, or we can sell more blankets to customers who have already purchased from us. Ideally, we’ll do both.
The business model is interesting in the publishing world because publishers have two different kinds of customers. The more books the publisher sells to bookstores, the more money it, and the author, will make. Here, the publisher has to sell books to one customer at a time. The other way the publisher can make money is to sell the rights of the properties it owns to other publishers. When we signed a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada, they acquired the worldwide rights to our book.
After Mom Inc. was published in Canada we learned that HarperCollins had sold the Chinese language rights to our book. We have no clue what happened after that as we never heard anything about it, but we thought this was great. It was more money for something we had already written. We just had to let HarperCollins sell something that we had already sold to them. We were tickled, but we never thought about it again.
Last week we were egosurfing (doesn’t everybody Google themselves?), and we made a surprising discovery: Chinese Mom Inc.! What a thrill to see a Chinese language edition of our book! (And the hilariously subtitled, “Good mother will make money.” We’ll talk more about that next week.)
Judging the recent MOMpreneur of the Year Award got us thinking about competition and how it affects us. As small business owners, competition is something we all need to navigate.
Learn from best practices of others
Reflect the strengths and weaknesses of your business by looking at others
Stops you from becoming complacent
Meet people in your field who you can potentially work with. No one really gets your business and its struggles better than your competitors.
This weekend marked the 1st Annual Mompreneurs® Conference and Awards Gala in Toronto. Over 200 women gathered to learn, laugh, be inspired, and swap stories about life as self-employed moms. The Conference was the brainchild of Maria Locker and the company she has created, Mompreneurs Showcase Group, an organization that boasts chapters throughout Ontario to help support, educate and empower Canadian moms in the work that they do.
Saturday also marked a passing of the torch as Canada’s MOMpreneur of the Year was named for 2013. We were thrilled to be included in the judging process again this year. Past winners of this honour have included such inspirational women as the founders of Mabel’s Labels, Martha Scully of Canadian Nanny, Laura Berg of My Smart Hands and most recently, Ann-Marie Burton of momstown.
This year’s Top 10 was no less impressive, with business ranging from brick-and-mortar outlets to innovation in product design. This year the top honour goes to Jade Barr founder of Jady Babys. Jade manufactures (herself!) soft-soled baby boots that are non-slip, machine washable, vegan, and made-in-Canada. The prize, $30,000 worth of prize will help Jade move her business to the next level.
There are already plans in the works for next year’s award, so if you haven’t done so in the past, make sure to throw your hat in the ring next time around. In the meantime, congratulations to Jade and Jady Babys. We know you’ll do us all proud.