Profile: Person

Do you want to know why some companies are more innovative, more profitable, command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? It’s because they start by asking “why,” according to Simon Sinek, an ethnographer, author of Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and speaker (his TED speech is among my favorites).

Jana Francis and Rett Clevenger launched Steals.com in April of 2008, well before the rise of Big Boy daily deal sites, like Groupon and Livingsocial. Compared to Steals.com, Groupon and other’s product offerings are “a mile wide and inch deep,” said Francis.

Thinking big, being bold, marketing and financial savvy: All these are required to make the leap from small business to high-growth business. But what keeps all these pieces together?

“I always thought men were smarter than me,” says Dareth Colburn, founder of USABride. Her online business — started 8 years ago in her apartment when she was a single mother, unemployed, and $30,000 in debt — is pushing the $3 million revenue mark after only eight years and now includes her own jewelry designs.

I think she was wrong about that “smarter” thing.

Read all of The Secrets of One Woman’s Rise from Destitution to Successful Business Owner on Forbes

One of the best things about working with entrepreneurs is that the good ones are willing to listen and, if they hear something that rings true, they make changes. 

After he retired, Burt Freeman set up a nonprofit program that he envisioned as a personal project in which he'd do all the work, "Something to keep me out of the pool halls."

In this last school year, the 11-year-old  program gave 4,400 children the opportunity to choose and own books – in most cases, for the first time in their lives. Freeman hasn't counted how many children have been served overall.