An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Patience. I’ve talked to potential clients for over a year before they’ve signed up with us. It’s kind of impossible to tell who’s yanking your chain and who’s serious. I had a woman who talked to me for hours at a time about the book she wanted to do, talked to one of my team members, promised she’d hire us, disappeared and then resurfaced a year later, wanting to have more exploratory conversations with us. I put my foot down with her but I’ve had people do that and then end up hiring us. We sell an unusual service and people get scared about finally working on a book they’ve wanted to write their whole lives. So it takes patience. It makes me feel for real estate agents and car salesmen!
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anna David.
Anna David is one of the world’s leading experts on how entrepreneurs can build a business from a book. A NYT bestselling author of eight books, she’s also the founder of Legacy Launch Pad Publishing, which has overseen numerous books that have become Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestsellers.
https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Writing is all I ever wanted to do. I cried when I was seven and discovered that the youngest author was six so I couldn’t set the record. I still have my first rejection letter, from when I was 10. I worked at magazines right out of college and once I was writing for places like Details, Cosmo and Playboy, I wrote my first book. I published four with HarperCollins, one with Simon & Schuster that became a NYT bestseller and I was broke; I somehow thought the cliché that writers don’t make money didn’t apply to me. I realized, in my mid-thirties, that even though I was a writer, I was also an entrepreneur since I was constantly having to sell myself and my books. And I thought: why don’t I try NOT to be a broke entrepreneur?!
I started studying marketing, got a mentor (Joe Polish) and had several epiphanies: one, that entrepreneurship combined my two passions (words and psychology) just as much as writing; two, that making money wasn’t a bad thing and three, that the world may not value writers per se but it values writing skills.
I also discovered something my publishers never told me: while few make money from book sales, many make money from the businesses they build on the backs of their books. After my first book, Party Girl, was released I was thrust into the role of “addiction expert,” and started going on TV every week to talk about addiction, doing TEDx talks on the topic and being interviewed for magazines and websites. This didn’t do anything for me, per se, because I didn’t have a business but I saw that if the attention a book gave you did support a business, it could really help it grow. But I didn’t want an addiction business because that would mean going into the morally corrupt world of rehabs. So, I thought, what business did I want to build with my books?
I decided I didn’t want anyone to be in the situation I’d been in: throwing everything into a book and discovering that you couldn’t survive on book sales. So it became my passion to create books for entrepreneurs and then show them to how to use those books to build their careers and leave a legacy.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
Probably it was when my first team member ended up accusing me of stealing her IP. It was the craziest situation: someone I’d paid enough money to buy a house was suddenly coming at me. Unfortunately, I’d paid her in advance for books and so I had to get a lawyer to retrieve the material I’d paid for years earlier. It really taught me about trust. People asked me after, “Didn’t you see the red flags? Looking back, couldn’t you tell she couldn’t be trusted?” And the answer is, not at all. I’d known her for over a decade. I’d let her stay in my guestroom, introduced her to countless friends and clients and had been to her kid’s birthday party a few months before this happened. I hate to say that this experience taught me not to trust people, but it did teach me that untrustworthy people aren’t always waving red flags. Sometimes they’re pink or even white.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
There was an error at a printing press and the factory accidentally put pages of another book they were printing in one of our books. That other book was what could be summarized as “cartoon devil porn.” All the printing press could say was “Sometimes pages of the previous book we were printing get placed in another book.” So it wasn’t our mistake but it impacted us. Trust me, I make mistakes every day and often they’re not that funny.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
About five years ago, I was able to meet and become friends with Joe Polish, one of the greatest marketers of all time and someone considered the “world’s greatest connector.” I cannot express enough the impact he’s had on my life. If I hadn’t met him, I guarantee I wouldn’t have a business that’s close to hitting seven figures this year.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
I have a self-funded company and honestly don’t know anything about raising money. I also know so many powerhouse women that I truly don’t know that many who are being held back. I know the statistics are bad but I don’t feel like I know enough to comment on it.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
Mentorship. Mistakes. Therapy. And of course the way women are speaking out now about abuse in the workplace is enormously helpful. I will say I have found the emotional abuse from my male bosses far harder to handle than the sexual abuse. So I’m glad that this kind of thing — like with the Scott Rudin situation — is also being addressed.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
We’re amazing multi-taskers. Our emotional intelligence is high.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
That we always know what we’re doing. Half of building my company has been making it up as I go.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
I think the mistake a lot of people make today is they think coming up with a name and starting an Instagram account is the way to start a “brand.” And it may be but that doesn’t mean that brand is going to make you any money. It sounds obvious but the only way to make money is to provide an expensive service or product that a handful people will pay for or an inexpensive service or product a lot of people will pay for. I think the former is easier.
It’s also a cliché but you have to be a hard worker. I was recently talking to someone who wanted help building her business but had rules like “you can’t contact me on the weekends” and “I’ll do this but I won’t do that.” I told her that you can’t have both; you DO have to work hard and do things you don’t want to in order to get help from other people to build a business. And you NEED help from other people to build a business.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, what are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder?” (Please share a story or example for each.)
1) Patience. I’ve talked to potential clients for over a year before they’ve signed up with us. It’s kind of impossible to tell who’s yanking your chain and who’s serious. I had a woman who talked to me for hours at a time about the book she wanted to do, talked to one of my team members, promised she’d hire us, disappeared and then resurfaced a year later, wanting to have more exploratory conversations with us. I put my foot down with her but I’ve had people do that and then end up hiring us. We sell an unusual service and people get scared about finally working on a book they’ve wanted to write their whole lives. So it takes patience. It makes me feel for real estate agents and car salesmen!
2) An ability to fire bad clients. Most of the people we work with are amazing but we’ve had a few who were very abusive. I tried to tell one of them about halfway through the process that we weren’t the right fit but I chickened out. The next time we had a client like her, after a few weeks I told her we were terminating our contract and she could keep all the work we’d done. Frankly, she terrified me. Maybe one day I’ll have the ability to terminate a contract and not allow the person to keep the work but it felt like a small price to pay to not have to work with her anymore.
3) An ability to adapt. The business world changes every day. As a writer, I watched publishing fall apart between 2007 and 2010 and was very slow to catch onto the fact that self and hybrid publishing was the future. Success requires trying to think ahead; by the time it’s an article in Inc magazine or people are recommending a tactic on podcasts, you’re behind the curve. I go on walks and tell myself, “Channel your inner Bezos; figure out what people in publishing are going to be doing in 10 years.” I’ve actually had some great breakthroughs that way (nothing I can tell you because then other people will know!)
4) An ability to manage a team. While managing a team is, in my experience, far easier than being managed, it’s still not easy. When you’re paying people, you’re dealing with whatever their unresolved issues are around authority. You’re dealing with mistakes — the ones you’re making AND the ones they’re making. It requires saying you’re wrong a lot. It requires reflecting on all the good and bad bosses you’ve had and trying to emulate the former and avoid being like the latter.
5) An ability to take time off. You need to recharge. I’m terrible at this.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I think so. We’ve published numerous addiction recovery memoirs and I know from writing my own books on addiction how many people I hear from regularly who say my book helped them get sober. I believe we help to eradicate shame around addiction for both the authors and their readers.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I would find a way to extend a woman’s childbearing years so they could process their trauma before having it spill out onto their kids. The greatest tragedy, to me, is that hurt people hurt people and most haven’t resolved their trauma before they’re out of childbearing age. Cycles repeat themselves. As the least scientific person in the world, I haven’t a clue if this could ever be possible but it certainly would be amazing. I don’t mean to sound like Marianne Williamson but I truly believe that if people processed their trauma, there would be fewer wars and tragedies because people would take their egos out of their decisions and proceed with love.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Arianna Huffington. I’m not saying that because this is Thrive. I’m saying it because she’s a badass and the queen of reinvention. I heard her say on a podcast that the quote she lives by is Rumi’s “Live life like it’s rigged in your favor” and I adopted it as my own. Also, I was once introduced to her and she was cool AF.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Female Founders: Anna David On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.