Livelihood Show

Here's how today's guest Jody Johnson, caught my attention: she sent me a marketing email which reads:

Have you planned your summer vacation yet? Why not? Is it because business is keeping you busy? Being a business owner is more than owning your own business. It's having the freedom to go on vacation with your family and having your business run without you.

Jody Johnson is Founder and Co-Owner of Action Coach, a business coaching program designed to help smaller businesses achieve significant growth by understanding and managing people, strategy, execution and cash flow. By helping businesses identify these points of leverage, clients routinely double or triple their revenues – even during economic downturns.

Together with her partner, Douglas Barra, Jody has a vision for her organization– to transform the economic landscape of Florida by helping small businesses succeed – and dedicates her time, energy, and passion to helping business owners prosper.

Do you have the freedom to go on vacation and have your business run without you? Jody has some ideas…

When most people think of sustainable or "green" design, we imagine solar energy and rain water harvesting. We usually don't think of mega-yachts and Monte Carlo –yet there is a natural and unexplored opportunity.

Victoria Cerrone is co-founder of Ports of Cause, a not-for-profit organization which leverages the power and reach of the yachting industry to champion ocean advocacy and promote sustainable luxury. Their mission is to unify and motivate the yachting industry under the "SMART YACHTING" initiative which drives a global awareness, education and innovation campaign around clean oceans and sustainability.

An attorney by training, she shifted away from the world of litigation, and built a portfolio of expertise in leading and advising business start-ups in the luxury brand market, and the art and cultural industries. In 2012, as a participant in Startup Weekend Orlando 2012, Victoria and her team came in 2nd place out of 44 with their idea for an online platform for artists to engage buyers, showcase and sell their work.

Today, she describes her role as creative strategist—the art of finding the shared interests among different but complementary worlds. The glittery world of megayachts; the urgency of ocean environment sustainability. Together: smarter yachts; cleaner oceans, an unexpected alliance that gives Victoria Cerrone a most remarkable work environment.

Have you heard the expression: what doesn't kill me makes me stronger? I think that's what Barbara Beach had in mind when she launched RadioActive Broadcasting Network .

For some, radioactive means break down and decay- a deadly uncontrollable force.

But when harnessed and channeled, it kills cancer cells and stop them from spreading. Indie rock group Imagine Dragons had a hit song in 2013 called Radioactive in which it represents becoming empowered and rising above anxiety and depression-- overcoming something that is supposed to oppress you.

RadioActive Broadcasting Network

Barbara's Livelihood story demonstrates that your experiences can make you better, and stronger and more successful. Although her career path in journalism, radio and marketing helped her make record break breaking accomplishments she learned the hard way accomplishments are no guarantee of long term security.

She blends media savvy with an admiration for technology . She utilizes her insights about community building to create collaborative communities for joint marketing (called affinity marketing) and customer engagement through events and user groups. She's building a media empire—Radioactive Broadcasting Network- that integrates internet, radio, print, social media and community platforms. And recently the American Health Journal, nationally syndicated on Public Television, has announced the addition of Barbara Beach to their production team!

It's amazing what you can do when you don't take no for a

An artist is a person who creates, practices or demonstrates their creative talent through performance.

Realists, says the Urban Dictionary, are the people who understand what needs to be done, and who do it to make the world a better place.

Think about your personal career path. When were you an artist, with your talent in the lead? When were you a realist, doing what needed to be done and applying your talents to the task at hand?

Today's guest is Ellen Bristol, who took her talent for language and the performing arts and applied it to the work of selling main frame computers. When that industry shifted, she applied what she learned about sales to create a best-selling program for managing successful sales and fundraising campaigns.

Ellen Bristol believes that asking people for money is an art; getting people to give you money is a talent. Find out the key elements behind this art and talent on this weeks Livelihood Show episode!

Be sure to take a look at Ellen Bristol's latest publications here.

What happens when you realize that you're the bottleneck inhibiting your business's growth and profitability?

Nina Kaufman is a business attorney and small business champion who caught my attention with her Checklist for Small Business Owners.

Here are the first few questions:

• Ever feel like you can take time off even one day a week seems unrealistic
• Ever miss time from a family vacation because you were back in the office fighting fires
• Are you fed up not making the kind of money that can support the life you want to lead
• Are you working way too hard for way too little money to show for it
• Do you feel constrained and frustrated by your inability to make a greater impact in the world

If your business is based on your knowledge and expertise, you're a professional services business. And the trap that many professional services businesses fall into, says Nina, is you can only sell the number of hours you have available to give to clients. Suddenly you're a slave to your own business, and the vision of being your own boss is distressingly like working for a terrible boss.

When Nina found herself in that trap, in your small law practice, she took it as a challenge: what are the essential elements for building a million dollar road map where you leverage, rather than sell, your expertise.

When Nina Kaufman asks: when would it be a good time to think about redesigning your business model so that it's more self-sustaining and less dependent on you? She's really wondering : When would the answer be it be NOW?

Nina L. Kaufman, Esq., owner of Ask The Business Lawyer, is an award-winning small business attorney, speaker, and Entrepreneur Magazine online contributor. Nina has a personal mission of offering straight-talk legal to bolster your business. Companies in the consulting, creative, and professional services arena save time, money, and aggravation with the foundation of contracts, agreements they need for success. — the legal bedrock they need to build self-sustaining companies.

Her creative approaches to serving the small business community garnered her the SBA's 2011 regional Women in Business Champion of the Year Award. Her multi-faceted business model, developed from over 15 years of small business legal experience guides knowledge economy firms through the legal issues they face in starting and running their own companies.

Her humorous, practical understanding of the issues that cause deer-in-the-headlights paralysis is reflected in the titles of some of her programs: What is the solution to small business slavery? How do we choose business partners who won't [BLEEP] us? How can we train our clients to pay us? Do you know where you intellectual property is tonight? and she has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Crain's NY, Forbes.com, SmallBusinessComputing.com, PINK magazine, The New York Law Journal, the American Bar Association Journal, and Entrepreneur magazine and has appeared on MSNBC and Fox Channel 5's Good Day NY program.

Nina is an educator at heart, which is reflected in her approach to legal services and pricing models, her writing, her professional speaking, and the online resources she has created for entrepreneurs at askthebusinesslawyer.com. I'm taking her up on her offer to Livelihood listeners for her Million Dollar Map program.

Do you believe that life is (a) a set of circumstances one makes the best of, or (b) that life is a result of choices one has made?

Today's guest, Rhonni Dubose asks this question to every person she interviews. She is a Festival Professional, who has crafted a career as an entrepreneur within the world of outdoor theme parks known as Renaissance Festivals.

Everyone in life has a purpose,…even if it's to serve as a bad example. In the burgeoning world of coaches, consultants and mentors, what should we look for when we assess the value of our role models?

Diana Robinson, lived in 8 places between the ages of 6 and 14 as she was growing up as a child in a military family. She's had 18 address, so far, she says. "I am like the "Morton Salt of moving" she tells me.. " when it rains, it pours!"

In August 1995, shortly after moving to Washington, D.C., 24-year-old Darell Hammond read a story in the Washington Post about two local children who suffocated while playing in an abandoned car because they didn't have anywhere else to play. Darell realized this tragedy could have been prevented. The passion was born, the idea was conceived. After attending community college and Ripon College, he helped lead the start-up of City Year Chicago. Under Darell's leadership, 600 City Year volunteers built two playgrounds and more than 500 community volunteers joined the incredible day of service.

Jennifer Bradley is a fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and the co-author of The Metropolitan Revolution (Brookings Press, 2013). The book, and her work in general, explain the critical role of metropolitan areas in the country's economy, society, and politics. Jennifer has written for The New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, and Democracy.