A Saucy Millionaire Role Model for Serial Entrepreneurs

**Great article reposted from Entrepreneur.com.**

Marcia Kilgore, creator of lifestyle and beauty brands, shares her fearless approach to business and life.

At first blush, Marcia Kilgore exudes the whimsy of a doe-eyed waif. Beneath the surface is a buckled-down businesswoman with a demanding yet optimistic nature. It would lead her to a trifecta as a serial entrepreneur, notably selling a majority stake of Bliss Spa to conglomerate LVMH for $30 million just three years after starting up.

Kilgore grew up in a working-class, suburban town of Outlook in Saskatchewan, Canada, and was “just like every other kid on the block” until her father died. She was 11. “It was so early, I think it brought on a greater sense of responsibility for myself,” says Kilgore, now 43. By her teens, she was already exhibiting the tendencies of a serial entrepreneur, juggling three part-time jobs in high school. She ultimately moved to New York and worked as a personal trainer, but was embarrassed by her acne-prone skin. In her quest to fix her own problem, she launched Bliss Spa in New York in 1996, which grew into a chain of spas and a wildly popular product line.

After selling Bliss to LVMH in 1999, entrepreneurial restlessness would kick in. She moved to the U.K. and started a cosmetics company, Soap & Glory, in 2006. The following year, she launchedFitFlop footwear. As if running multiple companies weren’t enough, Kilgore also writes the marketing copy and dreams up product names for both brands, often with a precocious twist like Soap & Glory’s ‘Sexy Mother Pucker’ lip gloss.

As Kilgore sits down for this interview with ‘Trep Talk, her tone is both whimsical and wise. She shares views on why it’s crucial to nip problems in the bud, get everything in writing and think twice before saying you’re too busy.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

Will Paula Deen Have the Last Laugh?

**Article from Time Magazine’s January 30, 2012 issue.**

Now that Paula Deen has become a pseudo-spokesperson for Type 2 diabetes, she’ll continue to enrage health nuts all the way to the bank

It’s probably safe to say that few of her viewers were surprised when down-home cooking doyenne Paula Deen announced that she had Type 2 diabetes. How could they be? Deen’s recipes were so gruesomely unhealthy, so prodigal in their use of butter and cream and sugar and all the things we are supposed to avoid that her show has, for several years now, had an almost libertine glee to it. Deen damned the torpedos, shrugged off cholesterol and generally embraced her role as the Hunter S. Thompson of the Velveeta set. Now that she has diabetes, her critics are crowing, as she surely knew they would. But Paula Deen may have the last laugh after all.

The Food Network star, who has earned a prodigious income over the past few years both from her show and a whole portfolio of related projects, admits that she has known of her ailment for nearly three years. And now, she says, she’s going to start addressing it — as the paid spokesperson for the manufacturer of a diabetes drug. Many observers don’t know whether to be horrified or high-five the old gal. But that is very much the spirit of her career to date.

After all, it’s Deen’s very doggedness and her absolute inability to bend to contemporary mores, that has made her what she is. Deen knew that, and her enormous success over the course of her 15-year career was based on her personal elan and a freewheeling indifference to health concerns that, in today’s climate, seemed in some weird way heroic. She was the Huey Newton of country cooking. The woman just didn’t care; she was going to deep fry some Twinkies, and that was the end of it. The result, just like our mothers told us, has been predictable. “Paula Deen was going to have some kind of health problem,” says chef Franklin Becker, the author of a well-known cookbook for diabetics. “It might not have been diabetes, but it would have been something. If you cook that way, if you eat that way, you’re going to get issues.” Becker, who has the same ailment as Deen, says he “completely identifies” with the way she likes to cook, as he felt the same before his diagnosis. But not everybody feels so sympathetic towards her right now.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/18/will-paula-deen-have-the-last-laugh/#ixzz1kQ3GgjLE

Battlefield SOPA

**Article from Time Magazine’s January 30, 2012 issue.**

Hollywood and Silicon Valley are duking it out over Internet regulation – by Michael Crowley

When the online information trove Wikipedia went dark for 24 hours on Jan. 18, the greatest impact was probably on panicked college students facing deadlines. But Wikipedia’s larger message was clear: none of us should take for granted the freedom and openness that have made the Web such a world-changing resource. Why make that point now? Because Wikipedia and several other major Internet companies fear the Internet is facing a serious threat from potential government regulation. Under intense pressure from movie studios and big music and media companies, Congress has been moving to create new legal powers to crack down on websites that offer illegal streaming and downloading of movies, music and other copyrighted content.

Two bills in Congress, the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act, would empower courts to make search engines like Google block alleged copyright violators from their search results and force advertisers to cut off payments to offending sites.  That has unleashed the latest battle in the long-running war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley over how to balance copyright issues with Internet freedom.  The showdown in Congress pits the recording and movie industries’ well-connected lobbyists against the dotcoms’ combined power of popular Internet sentiment and their own equally well-connected lobbyists.  (Among the supports of the legislation is TIME’S corporate parent, Time Warner.)

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2104826,00.html#ixzz1kQ0V4kfc