Starting your business can be a bit scary … but not if you follow in the footsteps of experts.
Here’s how one mom turned her passion into a multi-million dollar home grown business.
Julie wanted to teach her new baby all the things she loved including music but especially poetry and literature. After all, she was a high school English teacher, so she had more than enough knowledge on the subject.
And so she began hunting for videos that she could share with her baby. But much to her surprise, none existed.
At the time the only kind of videos on the market were Barney or Sesame Street. And they weren’t baby-friendly.
Maybe the best thing she could do was to actually create the videos her self?
Well that’s exactly what Julie Aigner Clark did. 
When her baby was born, she quit her job to be a full-time stay at-home mom.
And in her spare time, down in her basement, she started making visually enriched videos designed specifically for young babies.
Home Grown Business Gets A Big Break
It started out as small project but by the end of the year, when she tallied up how much money she had threw toward it, the number was around $15,000.
That was more than she expected.
Now she was curious to find out if she could get any of that money back. Would it be possible to market her homemade baby educational videos to retailers or daycare centers? Surely, there were other moms who would welcome these kinds of baby friendly videos into their homes.
And if so, this could be the big break for her home grown business.
So Julie sent a few of the videos to different publications for them to watch and then write up a review. And she also showed off her newly made videos at one of the country’s largest retail trade shows, Toy Fair.
And that’s when everything changed …
It’s where she met a buyer from The Right Start, a retailer of children’s products. The buyer could see how much Julie believed in her baby videos. The Right Start was willing to “test out” her videos and purchased 100.
Now it was just a matter of waiting.
Would people like them? Or would they immediately be rejected and all the enthusiasm for her new home grown business would be gone like a puff of smoke.
Disney Buys Her Business
Two days.
That’s how quickly The Right Start sold out the 100 videos they bought from Julie.
She was now the proud owner of a brand new home grown business … one she named Baby Einstein.
The videos she created carried the company’s namesake such as Baby Mozart and Baby Shakespeare.
Over the next five years, her business grew from one employee to five. And revenues had reach close to $25 million in sales.
Baby Einstein videos were getting great reviews from educators and parents. And the products ranged from videos, DVDs, and CDs.
All the excitement around Baby Einstein videos was enough to capture the attention of the Disney Company. And in 2001 Julie sold her company to them for an undisclosed amount.
Julie is credited with creating an entirely new industry by bringing the arts to babies and toddlers in child-friendly ways.
3 Tips for Starting Your Own Home Grown Business
And while she was breaking boundaries with her business, she was also battling cancer. She was diagnosed with breast cancer two times.
The last time was Stage 4 cancer. She focused all her energy on healing and won.
Julie’s battle with cancer inspired her to write a book about it titled, You Are the Best Medicine. It was a book that children could relate to. And it quickly became a best seller.
What advice does Julie offer others who are thinking about starting a business of their own but just haven’t pulled the trigger yet?
Start up Tip #1: Fear and doubt are always the biggest obstacles in starting a business. You’ll ask yourself is my idea good enough? Will others want it? You have to really believe in what you are doing.
Start up Tip #2: Be realistic. If the product or service you want to provide doesn’t exist, ask yourself why not? If it does exist, how will yours be better? Can you afford to make the very best product possible?
Start up Tip #3: You can’t do everything. You have to surround yourself with the good people. Do you have the right people involved? Remember, no one is good at everything, so be sure to surround yourself with people who can do what you can’t.
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