Barbra Sundquist
I’m Barbra Sundquist and I’m the person behind HomeBusinessWiz. Both my husband and I grew up on here on Vancouver Island and feel privileged to live in this beautiful part of Canada.
My first home-based business was selling Regal greeting cards at the age of eight. Believe it or not, my mother let me go door to door in our rural neighbourhood, entering the living rooms of complete strangers and doing my sales pitch. My favorite item in the gift catalogue was the baked potato gadget – a four-pronged thing that I now realize was basically useless to an experienced cook. But I must have been persuasive (or else they just wanted to get rid of me) because I sold a lot of them!
The 30% commission that I earned selling Regal whetted my appetite for more money-making ventures. One time I persuaded my younger sister and cousin to donate all their toys to my “store” and then sold them back for real money! My mom put the kibosh on that little venture pretty quickly.
By my teenage years I was engaged in a more legitimate home-based business: teaching private piano lessons from the basement of my family home. That gig went on for about eight years part-time and put me through university.
After graduating from the University of Victoria with an undergraduate degree in Psychology and a Master’s in Public Administration, I decided it was time to enter the “real world” of employment. I got a job in human resource management with the federal government in Vancouver. Good pay, great benefits, wonderful career advancement opportunities – and I was miserable.
This may sound juvenile, but the two things I couldn’t stand were: 1) riding up the elevator at exactly the same time every morning; and 2) having to stay at work on slow afternoons when I knew that I wasn’t getting anything accomplished. Those two things offended my sense of autonomy something awful.
I stuck it out for two years, then left and moved back to Vancouver Island. I started doing contract work for my former employer and other government departments. After a while, I woke up one morning and realized “I think there is a name for what I am doing. I think I am a self-employed consultant”. I decided I better buy a briefcase and get some business cards printed.
That was over 20 years ago, and I’ve been self-employed and working from home ever since (except for an enjoyable stint teaching business management at a university). I look forward to sharing my knowledge with you on this site, so that you too can enjoy the freedom of having a successful home business.
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ooops – i ended up posting an older version of my comment from yesterday … don’t know what happened there … please delete the second comment … thanks!
isabella
Hey Barbra,
We enjoyed your new blog mentioning MerchantCircle. We’d love to keep you updated as we unveil new features to help out small business owners.
Contact me at kevin@merchantcircle.com
Thanks.
Hi Barbra,
My name is Ryan Mettee and I’m an online marketer for OneCoach Inc, the leader in small business growth, offering coaching and consulting services to small businesses around the world. I read your blog recently and loved the content. It seems like a popular online destination for entrepreneurs. As you know, small-businesses are the fuel of the economic flame in the United States. In these tough economic times, how do small business owners succeed in business?
John Assaraf and Murray Smith have co-authored a New York Times bestseller book titled The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life. This book is a twenty-first century approach to business growth and success that shows business owners that the only thing holding them back is a lack of confidence and certainty that they can succeed. This book attempts to crack the entrepreneurial code and serves as a guidebook with a proven step by step process to help entrepreneurs take ownership of their economic destiny.
Assaraf, a New York Times bestselling author, business coach, and mega successful entrepreneur is responsible for building multiple multi million dollar enterprises including Bamboo.com (one of the fastest internet IPOs in history), Re-max of Indiana, and OneCoach. He’s also made featured appearances on Larry King Live, Ellen DeGeneres, and Donny Deutsch. Assaraf starred as a principle teacher in the blockbuster phenomenon The Secret, which told readers what to do to improve their lives. The Answer applies the same universal themes of the Law of Attraction and visualization from The Secret and applies them to business growth.
I’d like to invite you to conduct a book review of The Answer on your blog. We believe such a review would captivate your readers – the New York Times did – and ultimately help small businesses owners excel, even in the current economic environment. John is also open to conducting a phone-interview, conference call, or tele-seminar for your site. I can shoot you over a digital version of the book for your review and other assets. I look forward to your response.
Best,
Ryan
rmettee@onecoach.com