Home Business Success

It might sound like we're a little on the weird side (animal-wise) but I can assure you we're pillars of our community :) When my parents tell stories about me, they always begin at my pre-teen years when I was out to save every animal (and in particular, stray cats) I happened upon. My parents put up with an assortment of cats, mice, birds, rabbits, salamanders, toads and bugs. Then, as a teenager (as my parents recount), I moved on to trying to save a long line of boyfriends from themselves - to no avail, I might add.

For my Junior year in high school, I lived in Natal, South Africa as a Rotary Exchange Student. Upon my return to the USA, I enrolled at a small college in Iowa and 3.5 years later had a B.A. in Sociology. You know, there aren't many jobs out there for sociologists, so I sent letters to banks in southern Florida, hoping to land a job in the sunshine. (I had worked through high school at our local bank, so I actually had some experience in this field.) I sent out hundreds of letters and wallpapered my dorm room with the rejections. My friends got a real kick out of this :) Eventually I landed a job in Naples, Florida.

I hated that job. After six months I began to look for something different and ended up as a secretary in a law office. Never mind that I couldn't type and had no idea how to use a word processor or dictaphone. The lawyer who hired me was young and got a kick out of my candid answers during our interview. (I think it also helped that, at the time, I was really cute.)

After three years at Jones & Zelman, P.A., I had risen to the level of a legal assistant and ran my own department of three employees, handling real estate closings. It was at this point that I decided if I was going to do all the work of an attorney, I might as well be getting paid as one. So, I applied to law school.

By this time I was married to my husband, Mark. He is one heck of a guy. When I was accepted to Nova Law School in Ft. Lauderdale, he thought nothing of selling everything we owned, buying a run-down trailer in Ft. Lauderdale and getting a new job there. The only time I've seen him cry, was when I told him I was pregnant - two weeks after I had started law school! Things changed a lot in the outside world while I was in a law school. The fax machine was invented and personal PCs (running DOS) had replaced word processors in most offices. And, Jone & Zelman split up. So, I decided to go out on my own after being admitted to the Florida Bar (I had a miscarriage and spent all day in the hospital the day before I took the bar exam. But that's another story). At the time, I was the youngest woman to go into sole practice in the county. Everyone thought I was crazy. And everyone thought I would fail. Huh! Guess I showed them.

After five years in practice in Naples and the birth of our third child, Mark and I once again decided to pull up stakes and move. This time to my hometown, Bellevue, Iowa. While I was supporting the family, Mark had gone back to school to become a Master Electrician and was anxious to start his own business. And I was sick of practicing law (everyone hates you - even your own clients) and tired of living in the city. I sold my law practice to two young lawyers, Pinter & Shapiro.

I was looking forward to being a stay-at-home-mom. I hadn't spent much time with my children, not even taking any time off work after they were born (we really couldn't afford it), and I felt like I was missing out. What I hadn't anticipated was how I was going to feel a few months later, when my life seemed to be nothing more than changing diapers and vaccuuming the same stretch of living room carpet. And I also hadn't anticipated becoming very ill with fibromyalgia.

The past few years of pregnancy, work, and being up all night with babies (my two youngest children are 14 months apart) had taken its toll. I found myself barely able to get out of bed, unable to sleep, and in so much pain I couldn't even feed the babies. It took a few months to get well and in the meantime, I decided I needed to get back to work. But what was I going to do in a small town in Iowa? I was hopelessly infected with entrepreneur bug and had no intention of working for someone else.

My father helped me make the decision on my next career move. He said, "Write down a list of all the things you feel are important in a career. Then get out the newspaper and look through the types of things out there and see what matches up with your list and your experience and qualifications. That will give you some direction."

Believe it or not, I ended up deciding on a career in financial services! It was that decision that spawned Women's Financial Services. Women's Financial Services? Once again everyone thought I was crazy and everyone thought I would fail.

That was 1994. I started WFS with a phone book, a shoebox of index cards for a contact list, a little red desk, a folding chair and a rotary dial phone - in my bedroom. Now I was a work-at-home-mom. My little ones were now 1 and 2. I hired an assistant in '95 who also had a 3-year-old daughter whom she brought to work with her. Those three little ones trashed the house every day and we spent the last 30 minutes of every day cleaning it up. Those were the days! As the business grew, we began renovating rooms downstairs for "mom's office." WFS ended up taking over every room but the kitchen and had three employees.

About that time, the City was giving me flack for running such a large business out of my home. And about that time, one of the local banks lost their financial services representative. The bank gave me a call to see if I would be interested in moving my offices to the bank and also handling their client base - solving my problem and theirs. For the first time in six years, our home was without office furniture and equipment. It took a little adjusting for everyone in the family. The kids no longer had four computers to play on and you couldn't find a piece of scratch paper, tape, scissors, stapler, or hole puncher to save your life :)

It was WFS that got me on and "into" the Web. I put up a large and robust website and used it extensively for marketing and customer service. Originally, I hired a web designer to handle everything, but as time went on and I became more knowledgeable about web development, I relied on her less and less. It wasn't long before I took over the management of all three of my websites.

Why am I boring you with this "story of my life"? Because I think it's so important for people to realize life is a journey. Everything you do gives you experience to help you in the next step. It all builds upon itself. Everything I have ever done has prepared me to do what I'm doing now.

You should never stick with something you're not happy doing because you're concerned it would be a "waste" of your education or experience. My degree in sociology, although impractical, helped me in my job as a legal assistant. And at this moment, I have a slough of degrees and licenses I'm not using - and may well never use again.

In July of 2001, I decided to risk it all and go for broke with my latest "shower idea." Seriously. Lot's of people get ideas in the shower. I get them all the time (and I'll bet you do too). But this time, I hired a financial planner to take over WFS and launched my idea into reality. You know, I'm nearly 40 (39.75 to be exact) and this latest adventure is causing me to lose my hair! (Which is really a shame because I've always considered it to be my best feature.)

The WhatHelps? Network began as a shower idea on 1/1/2000 - really, a turn-of-the-century idea. At the time, I had the main website for WFS up at www.moneyhelps.com. During this particular shower, I got to thinking, "MoneyHelps is pretty catchy. Money really does help. But so do lots of other things. I wonder if there are any other good "Helps" domains available?" So I quickly got out of the shower, ran downstairs into my home office, plugged in my computer (remember, it's 1/1/00 and the Internet was going to crash, and my computer would explode, and we wouldn't have any fresh water), dialed into my ISP at a whopping 28.8, logged onto Network Solutions, and began my search for more "Helps" domains. And holy cow! Everything I could think of was available.

Now, how to get the money to register these babies ... My credit cards got me about 75 registrations. That afternoon, I pitched my idea to register as many of these domains as possible to my father. For a 49% stake in my new company, he agreed to put up the rest of the money.

Before I knew it, WhatHelps?, Inc. had 550 "Helps" domains under its belt. Now, what to do with them ... It's one thing to own 550 domains and quite another to come up with a viable business plan to use them. It took me six months of research and about a thousand re-writes to put something together that looked like it might even remotely have a chance of making some money.

And about that same time the stock market took a nose dive, dot-coms started dying by the droves, and I could've kicked myself for not taking that shower a year earlier.

Nevertheless, I had a commitment for funding of up to $50,000 and a really good attitude. So I decided to go for it ... On 7/5/00, four of us unpacked the new computers I'd ordered from HP, screwed our new desks together and setup shop in my living room. My home once again became an office.

The rest of the story is pretty typical of a start-up. We designed and re-designed. My business plan was re-written a thousand more times. I put an advisory board together. Startup.com came on board as a minor shareholder. I managed to secure $275K in low interest financing through local business development funds (but had to mortgage my children to get it).

We moved into a "real" office. We've endured at least one setback per week since our adventure began - incompatible software, site crashes, server crashes, hack attacks - you name it - it's happened to us.

We're continuing to develop our web software - with three new products to come out over the next year. And we're scanning the globe for our next round of funding. If all goes well, we'll close on our next round with a strategic partner from China before the new year. And then WhatHelps? will go global - first stop: Hong Kong. To be continued ... Send Maalox!

Michelle Wilbers is the CEO of WhatHelps? Inc.