Sideline to Success

These are only a few women who have created billion-dollar businesses from a side hustle, as we love to call it from time to time. Women who didn’t set out to create the success they achieved, only to make a little extra money for them and their families. Yet their hard work and dedication lead them to financial freedom from a side hustle.

In the 1930's, Mary Kay a young housewife and mother of three began selling books in order to make extra money for the household. Her husband worked, but yet there was not enough money for the family of five to live on. This woman was successful in her sales effort, and she was able to sell more than twenty-five thousand dollars worth of books within her first six months at the job. In the year of 1938, this woman found herself divorced. She then changed her career to selling Stanley Home Products by conducting home parties.

Undaunted by her negative experience in business, the same year, this woman began to write a book for women who were part of the working world. So, on September 13, 1963, through much labor, Mary Kay Cosmetics was born. With her life savings of only a few thousand dollars, and the help of one of her children, a now-grown son named Richard Rogers, Mary Kay started the long process of making her dreams become a reality for her and the millions of women across America.

She parlayed $5,000 into a billion-dollar company.

Paula Deen was a homemaker and bank teller before entering professional cooking. She divorced her first husband in 1989 shortly after moving to Savannah. She was left with only $200 and her two teenage sons.

Paula was considered a good Southern cook, so she started a small catering company called The Bag Lady. She would make sandwiches and other meals, then her sons would deliver the food. The Bag Lady was very successful and soon outgrew her kitchen.

In 1997, Paula self-published her first cookbook, The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cooking and has written several others cookbooks as well. She began her relationship with the Food Network in 1999. Deen’s success in publishing, where she has sold over eight million books, then translated into the magazine world, and Cooking with Paula Deen, her bi-monthly title, launched shortly thereafter, growing to a circulation of over one million.

With continued expansion, and more planned on a global level in 2010, Paula Deen has remained true to her fans, viewers and readers that look to her name for style, taste and inspiration in the kitchen and the home with her line of cookware, cutlery, seasoning, collectables and lines. The list goes on.

Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 on a Louisiana plantation and daughter of former slaves. It was during the 1890s she began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused her to lose most of her hair. She began to experiment with many homemade remedies.

In 1905 Sarah moved to Denver and married her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis newspaperman, and began to use the name "Madam" C.J. Walker. She founded her business and began selling Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower, a scalp conditioning and healing formula, which she claimed had been revealed to her in a dream.

To promote her products, the new "Madam C.J. Walker" traveled for a year and a half on a dizzying crusade throughout the heavily black South and Southeast, selling her products door to door, demonstrating her scalp treatments in churches and lodges, and devising sales and marketing strategies.

Madam C.J. Walker died in 1919 from complications of hypertension. She was 51. At her death she was considered to be the wealthiest African-American woman in America and known to be the first Africa-American millionaire.

Please tell me what your side hustle is.

Make a new friend,this weekend.Visit a new blog, and visit some of my new blog friends.

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