Reinventing Your Career: Success Tips from Debra Cohen

Women switch careers or start businesses for any number of reasons. For Debra Cohen, president of Home Remedies of NY, becoming a mother marked the turning point that took her from employee to stay-at-home mom to entrepreneur. Here, she shares some of the secrets to her success.

Read more

Building a Strong Future

It’s easy for Debra Cohen to remember when she started her business; she marks time by her oldest daughter’s birthday. Cohen launched Home Remedies of NY, her home-based home-remodeling referral business 13 years ago, when her oldest daughter was 6 months old. A need to earn extra cash for her family combined with boredom that set in when she transitioned from full-time employee to stay-at-home mom made starting a business somewhat of a necessity. But determining exactly what type of business—and what business model to use—was a process. Read more

Gearing up for a Great Year

As we begin to wrap up 2009, I want to take a few minutes to encourage you to start planning for 2010. The end of the year is a natural time to consider where you are, what you’ve accomplished, and, most important, what you want to accomplish in 2010—and beyond. Here are a few tips on how to make this the year that you achieve your goals. Read more

What Is Your Self-Worth?

Cheryl Saban’s latest book empowers women to look within for validation.

Worth is infrequently related to cost. For example, the memory of hearing your child’s first word is priceless; spending time in nature can calm the mind and restore the soul—yet it requires only a short walk or drive to a local park. Sincere love and friendship are free, yet immeasurably valuable. Unfortunately, as women, we often undervalue ourselves, tying our worth to titles and accomplishments rather than who we are. Read more

From Minimum Wage to Rooftop Gardens

Teresa Carleo’s client roster reads like a who’s who in New York real estate development. But her success started with the question, “What am I going to do with my life?”
Read more

Reinvent Your Career: Success Tips from Teresa Carleo

When Teresa Carleo started her landscaping business 20-plus years ago, she was literally building a business from the ground up. Her only experience consisted of fond childhood memories of working in the garden with her parents. So she started at the bottom by taking a minimum-wage job watering plants.

Carleo worked to expand her knowledge, eventually breaking out on her own and founding Plant Fantasies Incorporated. Success didn’t come without struggle, but, today, Carleo’s thriving business offers a wide range of services—from flower arrangements and ground-floor landscaping to rooftop gardens—for some of New York’s top real estate developers. Here, she shares a few of her success tips: Read more

Reinvent Your Career: Success Tips Fran Lessans

Want to reinvent your career? Women everywhere are doing it. Some start from scratch by going back to school and learning a totally new set of skills. Others, like Fran Lessans, take the expertise they’ve gained, find an underserved niche and apply that knowledge to creating a new career. You can read Lessans’ story here, but first, read on to learn some of the success keys that helped her reinvent her career and go from being a nurse to leading Passport Health, a nationally recognized company specializing in immunizations. Read more

How Far Have You Traveled?

Fran Lessans took the phrase “find a need and fill it” to heart and built a thriving business.

When a door closes, Fran Lessans is tenacious enough to keep knocking until it reopens—or looking until she finds a new one. The CEO and president of Passport Health has worked to prove herself and her business model in the medical industry.

“Being a nurse and a woman was a challenge,” Lessans says. “There were a lot of roadblocks.” The stigma that, as a woman, she wasn’t intelligent or savvy enough kept some hospital CEOs, her initial prospects, from agreeing to see her. She finally determined to take on a male, minority investor early in the life of her business. It seems (almost) unimaginable now, but in the early 1990s, discrimination against women was still so fierce that she realized she “needed that deep voice” to do presentations. Read more

Reinventing Your Career

The cover story in the USA Today that landed outside my hotel room a couple weeks ago featured a man who’d worked in the automobile industry since his teens. Facing yet another layoff, the 35-year-old made the decision to shift gears, go back to school and pursue a career in the health industry. That type of story is becoming increasingly common in this topsy-turvy economy. But, for women, the trend has been on the rise for quite some time. Read more

The Sweet Life

Rachel Thebault went from investment banker to baker. By living her passion she’s enjoying a very sweet life.

For those who’ve acquired an education and built a career in a specialized field, making a major change can be unsettling—especially if you’re uncertain as to what the change should be. Rachel Thebault knows the feeling. After majoring in economics and working for Merrill Lynch and Bank of America as an investment banker, the long hours and hectic travel schedule had Thebault rethinking her career choice. “It didn’t allow me to have a lot of my own time outside the job,” she says. Read more

« Previous Page — Next Page »