From Fitness to Philanthropy: S. Daniel Abraham

The health and fitness industry is booming. After decades of abusing the body with work and unhealthy eating habits, consumers are starting to take an active role in restoring their body’s normal functions. Entrepreneurs immediately saw the demand for health-related products as a potential billion-dollar market. And they were right.

One of those entrepreneurs was S. Daniel Abraham, who introduced Slim-Fast, a line of diet shakes. He is one of the first to venture into the fitness industry during the 1940s with Thompson Medical Company, which sold a variety of diet supplements, including the controversial Dexatrim. But his introduction of Slim-Fast in the late 1970s made him a household name and one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the fitness world.

Slim-Fast became so popular that many people considered it the pioneering product of all diet supplements. Abraham marketed this product by incorporating it into the daily diet of all people, thus the phrase “a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, then a sensible dinner” arose.  With the success of Slim-Fast, Abraham was able to accumulate a fortune worth $1.4 billion. Every cent came from his own hard work and determination. Slim-Fast also remains to be one of the oldest diet products in the market today, thanks to Abraham’s solid long-term plan.

Today, the entrepreneur is busy doing philanthropy. From physical fitness, he now focuses his attention to healthcare and nutrition, education as well as peace talks. He also founded an organization dedicated to his advocacy for peace, Center for Middle East Peace. Through this, he gained the attention of leaders to help end the Arab/Israeli conflict.  As a passionate advocate of education, he has funded several programs and projects for the improvement of the academe.

Being an entrepreneur helped Abraham fulfill his other goals in life. With his contributions in both the private and public sectors, he is indeed one of today’s most influential people.

Dropbox and Drew Houston’s Green Thumb

Say you’re at home, working on a file, but you won’t finish before you need to leave… and not only is your laptop completely dead, but you can’t find a single USB drive. How can you finish your work somewhere else? You could email the file to yourself, assuming you know that exact situation is going arise. But what if you forget? In 2007, Drew Houston left home without his USB drive and decided to write the code for what would become Dropbox.

Dropbox is a free file-syncing, cloud-based service that eliminates the need to send files to yourself, to remember USB drives, or any other awkward work-around. It began as a simple cloud service, and now boasts more than forty-five million users worldwide with different types of Dropboxes for different uses. Its key to success lies in the way Houston navigated the problems he saw in competing file-hosting services — slow servers, complicated interfaces, and errors when they tried to handle large files. His vision for the company is to keep it lean – free from features that distract from the goal of a speedy, reliable service.

Houston’s success with Dropbox drew the eagle eye of Steve Jobs in 2009, who saw both that the cloud-based service was key to the future of computing and that Dropbox was number one in the arena. Houston and his Dropbox partner, Arash Ferdowsi, turned Jobs down; they wanted to build a big company, not to be beholden to another, Houston said.

With a huge number of users signing up every day, Dropbox has arguably already attained “big company” status. And even though ninety-six percent of users are signed up for free plans — which allow up to two Gigabytes of storage a month — they often surpass the storage limit and sign up for paid plans. Dropbox’s business model means that even if no new users join in 2012, sales will still double what they were in 2011.

But Drew Houston is confident Dropbox will continue to see remarkable user growth, especially given its current numbers are up three-fold over 2010’s and only continue to climb. All thanks to a misplaced USB drive.

Model-Turned Entrepreneur Kathy Ireland

Swimsuit model Kathy Ireland has been turning heads since her late teens. Featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for thirteen consecutive years, it’s clear that her career as a model has been very successful. Despite this, Ireland decided to venture into the world of business as an entrepreneur. 

The supermodel was born in 1963 to parents who worked as labor union organizers and charity volunteers. Coming from humble beginnings, Ireland felt she needed to do something in her life to change her family’s situation. Opportunity knocked when she was discovered by an agent for the Elite Model Management Company, but she only saw modeling as a way to pay her way through college and start a business of her own. After a long and lucrative career in front of the camera, Ireland started her first business. 

She put her name on a line of socks in 1993, which soon proved to be a best-seller at Kmart. Seeing the potential returns, the retailer gave Ireland her own clothing line. This prompted her to create “Kathy Ireland Worldwide,” a brand product marketing company. 

With her partnership with Kmart, Ireland was able to market products from sixteen different manufacturers, including Standard Furniture. When the exclusive contract with Kmart Corporation ended in 2003, she was able to take in more clients, mostly independent mid-tier retail stores. Thousands of clients brought her an annual take of about ten million dollars, making her Forbes prototype for model-turned-mogul. 

In addition to her marketing firm, Ireland recently launched her latest business, wedding dresses. 

Ireland used modeling as a tool to reach her goal and never lost sight of what she wanted in life. With her perseverance and relentless drive, Ireland is a perfect example of a person who uses her strengths to fulfill her ambitions.

Kathy Ireland's interview with Parents TV

The First Black-American Female Entrepreneur, Madame C.J. Walker

Way before Oprah was considered the most powerful Black-American woman, there was Madame C.J. Walker, a pioneering entrepreneur who built a multimillion-dollar enterprise during early the late 1800s. During her time, she was known as a leader in the beauty industry who skillfully assembled a grassroots sales force and tapped into a new market of American consumers. She is also the first self-made female millionaire in the United States.

The daughter of freed slaves, Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana, year 1867. Both her parents died when she was just seven years old, and seven years later she found herself married to her first husband. At that time, some people might have thought that her life would never amount to anything valuable.

With little formal education – mostly because laws of the land did not provide equal opportunities for colored people back then – Walker had to make a living out of menial jobs. But destiny had other plans for her.

Walker contracted a hair and scalp problem, which she desperately tried to cure through a self-made formula that she said, came to her through her dreams. She also started working as a sales agent for another black-owned beauty business, which ultimately encouraged her to launch a line of hair-care products.

It didn’t take long for Walker to become the founder of Madame C.J. Walker Enterprises, a company which manufactured a series of hair-care products.  Her second husband, a newspaper salesman, helped establish the company by guiding its advertising in black newspapers. Walker also sold her products door-to-door, from churches to houses all over the South.

At the turn of the century, Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower has gained a following. She started to build a beauty empire during this time by training her “hair culturists” at a college in Pittsburgh. Eventually, her empire – The Walker System – grew to employ almost 3,000 people, offering meaningful employment to thousands of Black women.

A century after her rise to success, Walker is remembered as the first female entrepreneur who overcame the odds with relentless ambition.