Want to be inspired?
Read this story about the growth of Barefoot Books. An excerpt:
Around that time my husband surprised us by arranging to bring the whole family to Kenya to celebrate my 40th birthday and our 10th wedding anniversary. We were on a British Airways (NYSE:BAB) flight and suddenly this six-foot-four Kenyan guy comes up from the back of the plane and breaks into the cockpit. The plane went into free fall: It fell between 12,000 and 15,000 feet. All four engines were stalled. An American basketball player climbed into the cockpit and pulled the guy out. Afterward the pilot came on and said four more seconds and it would have been irretrievable.
I got back from that trip and found two letters waiting for me. One was from British Airways saying, "It's not our fault." The other was from my U.K. warehouse. It said, "We've gone bankrupt and we've got all your books and all your money and you're not getting any of it back." I lost hundreds of thousands of pounds--all my Christmas sales from the U.K. I did get the books back.
At the same time my right-hand person in New York said she wasn't coming to Boston, so I had no one selling in the U.S. Then we sent out our first direct-mail campaign--100,000 catalogs--the week of the anthrax scare. No one opened anything. I remember sitting with my husband and saying, "What is this telling me? Am I supposed to stop?" Obviously I chose not to.
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