Since becoming a B-School affiliate in 2018, I’ve welcomed nearly 200 creatives into B-School. First and foremost, being an affiliate is a position of trust and I take it very seriously. 

If you admire me and my business and want to build your own big-hearted and creative business—with Marie Forleo and me as your mentors—please join us in B-School! 

“Marie Forleo’s B-School helped me rediscover the joy of running a creative business and showed me the potential for living generously.”

From stagnant sales (and $50,000 in debt) to profits in matter of months.

Since taking B-School in 2014, I've taken a personal approach to my communications and marketing and I've embraced a forthright and honest style in my writing. I share quite a bit with my readers and go into detail about how and why I make decisions. I've talked about the struggles I've faced in my business. 

This is an approach that Marie Forleo teaches in B-School: communicating with one's customers should be a service to them. 

And so I offer my own perspectives, realizations, trials and errors with you so that you might also benefit from my failures and join me in celebrating the successes. I'm transparent with my business. 

I’ve generated a sales graph from Shopify, from when I started selling online in October 2007 until the end of December 2018, marking the release of the 10th Anniversary issue of UPPERCASE magazine. 

From my very early days of e-commerce, selling artwork, greeting cards and handmade paper goods online, to the release of the first issue, the birth of my son... the graph tells the story of UPPERCASE's growth as a company and me as an entrepreneur.

You can see that there was an immediate positive effect and spike in sales once I started taking B-School. Click here to see an even more detailed, larger chart.

The magazine had modest growth in the early years. I had help in my retail space for a number of years, and with being a new mom and trying to grow my publishing company, I assumed the logical thing would be to hire more help for the magazine. 

As online sales were steadily increasing month over month and I was closing the retail location to concentrate on publishing, I brought on some employees specifically to manage orders and subscriptions. In 2012, I had a marketing manager, too. We were a nice little team for a while, but as you can see on the graph, there was no growth. Monthly sales were stagnating and the team and I weren't meeting the minimum monthly sales quota required to keep the ship afloat. 

Desperate for a solution to keep my beloved publishing business alive, I used my credit card and enrolled in B-School. I started implementing what I was learning right away. I was scraping the bottom of my line of credit and faced running out of funds to pay my considerable print bills. As the sole earner in the family, UPPERCASE was the only thing supporting my family. 

I had to lay everyone off and forego my salary. 

I call it my big "reboot." 

I pulled the plug on my expectations of what a "real" publishing company looked like and returned to my roots: just me. 

Regular readers will know I'm a hard worker, but I never worked harder than that year following the reboot. The spikes in the graph are a testament to the extreme effort I put into kicking UPPERCASE into a profitable company. Without the burden of other people's salaries, plus monthly growth in online sales, I was very quickly out of the financial hole. Soon, UPPERCASE was turning a profit. And it continues to be on an upward trajectory.

Taking B-School—and more importantly, taking B-School to heart—was the catalyst that I needed to put my company on a financially sustainable path.