The Boss of You

I received an email a cou­ple of weeks ago from a woman I attended uni­ver­sity with, years and years ago. Although we still know peo­ple in com­mon, we hadn’t stayed in touch really, until she emailed me to tell me she was set­ting up her own PR com­pany and had wan­dered into the bookstore’s entre­pre­neur­ship sec­tion only to find just the book she was look­ing for… with my face on the back cover!

Liz is a pub­li­cist in the per­form­ing arts sec­tor (we both stud­ied clas­si­cal music at the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia), and with sev­eral solid years of expe­ri­ence under her belt she’s feel­ing like it’s time to go solo. I’m really excited for her and think she’s ide­ally suited to the entre­pre­neur­ial life; she’s smart, ambi­tious, and has that “fire in the belly” that’s com­mon to all of us who want to be our own bosses. So when she wrote this review of our book on Ama­zon, it meant a great deal to me.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Emira and Lau­ren for writ­ing this excel­lent book. I am half way through, and read­ing it seri­ously: I am read­ing a cou­ple of chap­ters at night, and going back and answer­ing the ques­tions by day in writ­ing. I plan on start­ing my own PR busi­ness, and this book has become a bit of a “man­i­festo” for me. What I love most is the basic, prac­ti­cal advice it offers, along with the encour­age­ment. It’s pos­i­tive and reas­sur­ing, yet direct about the pit­falls of mak­ing mis­takes with your business.

Next, I love the fem­i­nist sub­text of this book: that us women deserve to be paid what we’re worth, and I loved the urge (“We beg of you, close the wage gap between men and women!”) to price our­selves appro­pri­ately, and not modestly.

“The Boss of You” is hit­ting me on a few lev­els, inspires me, and is giv­ing me courage to get my ducks in a row for the even­tual launch day (still a ways off — but def­i­nitely in the works).

I really hope the Oprah pro­duc­ers come across this book and get these two rockin’ chicks on the Oprah show. Talk about “liv­ing your true life” — and earn­ing a liv­ing while doing so — !

When meet­ing a graphic designer to work on my logo, she kept grab­bing the book and flip­ping through it and said, “okay. I really have to get this.”

I encour­age any­one (men, too) who has a dream of start­ing a busi­ness to get this book. My only wish is that it was edited to remain Cana­dian with Amer­i­can ref­er­ences (instead of the reverse) but who’s quibbling?

GET THE BOOK, PEOPLE.

Cheers,
Liz Parker
Publicist

(Thanks, Liz, for say­ing such nice things about our book — and for grant­ing me per­mis­sion to re-post this here.)