The Spanx Story: What's Underneath the Incredible Success of Sara Blakely's Billion Dollar Empire

Description

What can you learn from the most successful companies in the world The Spanx Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled entrepreneur Sara Blakely to dominate the shapewear industry and become a billionaire. Sara Blakely had a problem. She had a beautiful pair of white designer pants hanging in her closet just calling out to her to wear them, even though they accented her least favorite feature: cellulite. After searching high and low for a solution and coming up empty, an idea was born: Spanx. The Spanx Story chronicles Sara's journey from long nights researching patent and trademark law, to years of cold shoulders she received from the titans of the pantyhose industry, to the cold call that led to the shelves of Nieman Marcus. It was a long road of incredible hard work and determination that led Spanx to become the iconic brand it is today. This book educates and inspires entrepreneurs and innovators to find the problem for their solutions and persevere through all of the hard work that goes into building a billion-dollar company. Through Sara's story, you will learn: How to develop an idea and turn it into a business. How to start a company with very little capital by thinking outside of the box and dedicating every spare moment to your goal. How to recognize when it's better to hire a CEO than to be the CEO. And, how to stay the course and continue to believe in your idea, despite naysayers and going against an industry resistant to innovation.

Charlie Wetzel became a full-time writer in his mid-thirties after working as a sexton, dishwasher, roustabout, waiter, chef, teacher, car salesman, and college dean. A graduate of the University of New Orleans with degrees in English, he has written ninety-five nonfiction books, as well as fiction and screenplays. He wrote "The Candy Shop, " a short film that won the Crystal Heart Award at the 2011 Heartland Film Festival. Charlie and Stephanie, his wife of twenty-five years, have three children and live in north Georgia. When he's not writing, Charlie is reading, cooking, running, watching movies, and training in martial arts. Stephanie Wetzel has been her husband Charlie's primary editor for as long as they've been married, including for every book Charlie has written with author John C. Maxwell. A writer in her own right, she blogged for a decade-back when blogging was still cool. She now partners in writing with Charlie and works with other authors. Stephanie loves being wife to Charlie and mom to three young adults. She forces herself to run with Charlie, but she actually enjoys reading, learning, traveling, and eating former chef Charlie's cooking. Stephanie grew up obsessed with horses and competed as a teenager at extremely low levels in local shows. No longer a regular rider, she still occasionally gets a tear in her eye at the sight of a horse.