“Entrepreneurs who daydream about converting a hobby into a career should consult The Business of Bliss.”—USA Today Share the inspiration, and then make your own dreams come true. Behind every successful woman is a tale of self-reliance, persistence, and the joy of following one’s heart. Former fashion editor Cornelia Powell abandoned stressful corporate life to open a vintage bridal shop. Homemaker Patti Upton built Aromatique, now a 500-person company, on a product that she created “just for fun.” They, and each of the 30 women profiled here, have turned their passions into profitable businesses. Their wonderful stories will encourage you to do the same. A companion to the much praised and highly successful titles, A Shop of One’s Own and Turn Your Passion into Profits.
Achieve Work -Life Harmony! Is it getting harder to find success in your career? Business expert and keynote speaker Amy Vetter developed the B3 Method as a way to discover and align your authentic self and inner talents with the work you do. Illustrated by her own life lessons, experience from other successful business leaders, and backed by scientific research, the B3 Method will help you live more harmonious, impactful life at work and home. With the B3 Method you will learn to: Live a more authentic and purposeful life, Discover your inner talents and passions, Build prosperous business relationships. Amy is an accomplished business executive, entrepreneur, national speaker, CPA and yoga instructor. For more than twenty years she has provided business guidance to thousands of entrepreneurs and corporate leaders Worldwide. Amy regularly contributes insights to Entrepreneur, Inc. CPA Practice Advisor and Accounting Today.
Customer experience pioneer Jeanne Bliss shows why “Make Mom Proud” companies outperform their competition. Her 5-step guide to customer experience and culture transformation makes this achievement possible. Bliss urges companies to make business personal to earn ardent fans and admirers, by focusing on one deceptively simple question: "Would you do that to your mother?" “Make Mom Proud” companies give customers the treatment they desire, and employees the ability to deliver it. They turn “gotcha” moments into “we’ve got your back” moments by rethinking business practices, and they enable employees to be part of the solution to fix customer frustrations. Bliss scoured the marketplace seeking companies who excel at living their core values, grounded in what we all learned as kids. She offers a five-step plan for evaluating your current behaviors and implementing actions at every level of the organization. Step 1. “Be the Person I Raised You to Be” Understand how you are hiring, developing and trusting employees to bring the best version of themselves to work. Vail resorts, for example, the world's largest ski resort operator, banned the three words "Our policy is..." from their vocabulary, freeing employees to take spirited actions to deliver "the experience of a lifetime." Step 2. “Don’t Make Me Feed You Soap” Learn the eight key frustrations that bind us as customers (waiting, fear, anxiety, the black hole of no communication, etc.) and how to apply actions from companies who are delivering a seamless, frictionless and easy experience. Step 3. “Put Others Before Yourself” Determine if your focus is on helping customers achieve their goals – and evaluate how that is fueling your growth. Canada's Mayfair Diagnostics, for example, spent over a year studying the emotions of patients entering an imaging clinic, so they could redesign their welcome to deliver warmth and caring over procedure and process. The newly designed clinic achieved profitability in record time. Step 4. “Take the High Road” Learn how companies who do the right thing rise above the competition. Virgin Hotels, for example, named #1 U.S. hotel by Conde Nast Reader's Choice Awards, walked away from price gouging at the mini bar, so you'll never pay more for that Snickers bar than what you'd pay at the corner market. Step 5. “Stop the Shenanigans!” Evaluate your current company behaviors and identify the key actions that you can begin immediately. With 32 case studies and examples from more than 85 companies, this is a practical and easy to follow guide for your experience and culture transformation. Filled with comics to snapshot our experiences as customers, a “mom lens” to reflect continuously on your performance, and a “make-mom-proud-ometer” quiz – the book makes Bliss’s approach accessible and approachable. Join the movement to #MakeMomProud by applying this book across your organization. Whether you're contemplating your company's returns policy, its social media presence, or its big-picture strategy, this approach will help your company anticipate both employee and customer needs, extend patience, and show respect at all times.
The how-to companion book to The Business of Bliss, this book explains the basics of starting your own small business, from writing a business plan to finding financial help, hiring staff, and more.
Drawing on her first-hand experience at top companies as diverse as Lands’ End and Microsoft, Jeanne Bliss explains why even great corporations can drift to delivering mediocrity to customers, and she offers a proven solution to break the cycle. Different divisions and departments in corporations can fail to communicate and act as a team—they create silos instead of a superior customer experience. Jeanne Bliss shows in stark detail how profits suffer when businesses focus on their organizational charts and not their customer relationships. This book provides leaders the tools and information they need to overcome organizational inertia and deliver a meaningful customer experience. The author includes diagnostics to determine if a company’s core strengths, metrics, and systems improve or harm customer relationships. With all these tools, leaders can address the organizational challenges they face with an exhaustive review of the Chief Customer Officer role and an evaluation to determine the right solution for their culture and company.
Garden of Bliss begins on the French Riviera, where Moffitt, despite her glamorous European lifestyle, feels empty. Realizing that financial success doesn't necessarily equate to happiness, she looks inside herself and decides to make some changes. The message of her journey is simple: bliss is a destination that exists within all of us. Using the metaphor of a secret garden, Moffitt encourages her readers to manifest this space in the physical world and connect with the divine feminine through nature.
Lauren Myracle brings her keen understanding of teen dynamics to a hypnotic horror story of twisted friendship. When Bliss’s hippie parents leave the commune and dump her at the home of her aloof grandmother in a tony Atlanta neighborhood, it’s like being set down on an alien planet. The only guide naïve Bliss has to her new environment is what she’s seen on The Andy Griffith Show. But Mayberry is poor preparation for Crestview Academy, an elite school where the tensions of the present and the dark secrets of the past threaten to simmer into violence. Openhearted, naïve Bliss is happy to be friends with anyone. That’s not the way it has ever worked at Crestview, and soon Bliss is at the center of a struggle for power between three girls—two living and one long dead.
Eating. Sleeping. Bathing. Chores. These are the things we do every day, yet few of us stop to consider how we perform the routines that occupy 95 percent of our lives: in chaos or serenity, with irritation or with joy. Here, in one elegant, copious and forever rereadable book, Alexandra Stoddard shows how to live a more beautiful, more ordered life, every single day. Drawing on the wisdom of Emerson, Samuel Johnson, Rilke and many others and warmed by Alexandra Stoddard's personal anecdotes, this book deals with life both philosophically and practically -- from discovering the sources of your well-being to buying the right stationery or sheets; from using solitude to replenish your spirit to using fabrics, ribbon, paper and your own five senses to transform your daily life. Living a Beautiful Life demonstrates how to use the ordinary in extraordinary ways, suggesting hundreds of techniques for turning dull, irritating routines into life-enhancing rituals; hundreds of simple ways to transform your days -- or your bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and desk -- into delights of beauty and efficiency. There's a marvelous trick for locating the perfect psychological spot for your bed, a quick way to use "remembrance of things past" to choose color schemes that suit you, suggestions for how to turn a fifteen-minute lunch break into a restorative experience. And throughout, Alexandra Stoddard shows how taking care of "the little things" can ultimately add up to a change in the big things. Most of all, Living a Beautiful Life reveals how a beautiful life can be achieved; how daily motions become truly satisfying patterns of pleasure; and how these patterns of pleasure can add up to a lifelived deeply and well, transforming even the most cluttered and hectic existence.
It's 1929, and Edith and Reuben Merkal, a couple from Long Island, are living the charmed life. Then the stock market crashes, ushering in the Great Depression. Reuben loses his construction business as well as the house he built for Edith and named 'Bliss.' The Merkals are victims of the times. Even so, they blame themselves and each other for their misfortunes. At first, Edith watches helplessly as a devastated Reuben does nothing about finding work. Eventually, she takes a job as a salesgirl, and comes to relish her growing independence. After Reuben reluctantly becomes involved with Sea Forth's small Jewish community as it fashions a response to an anti-Semitic incident, he begins to understand the reasons behind his life-long ambivalence toward his religion. His awakened sense of responsibility towards Europe's beleaguered Jewish population helps him put his own problems in perspective.
