Can’t resist re-quoting an article when it has to do with my hero Oprah. When I saw her in person at her Toronto show, she talked a little about the OWN pains and how she had ‘a little show to run’ at the time of its start. Here are a few lessons for other startups like us:

1. Moonlighting creates madness. It’s OK to plan a startup while employed by another company. However, it’s not ever wise to initiate customer facing operations without 100 percent leadership attention and focus.
2. Brand consistency matters.  There was nothing empowering about watching Tatum O’Neal’s childish spats with her father or Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson recounting her self-inflicted financial and personal mishaps.
3. Make it great.  Copying what works at other networks or revisiting the ghosts of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” won’t be enough for OWN to achieve entrepreneurial greatness.
4. Spend like a startup. I bet in the early days of Winfrey’s Harpo Productions Inc., first-class travel, expensive meals, employee bonuses and indulgent office digs were a reward for profitable financial performance, not a necessity.
5. Adversity is not failure. OWN is too early in the business development cycle to be called a failure.  The point is to learn from first missteps and continue to search for the sweet spot where a new business can operate in a sustainable way.
via 5 Lessons From Oprah’s Startup.

This spectacular woman keeps teaching me things even when she’s failing at something. Through watching her trials and tribulations and tuning into her brave show on those very same trials, I learn that not every business is perfect and that even very successful people can stumble on the way to even greater success.
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• What I Know For Sure, Lessons learned from #Oprah Winfrey (writedownthesewords.com)
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• 5 Traits of Great Startups (podiumventures.com)