Nine Lives
 Mary Cantando
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 2003 Cantando & Associates
 ISBN: 0972952802

Stories of Women Business Owners Landing on Their Feet. Written with Laurie Zuckerman.

As Marsha Firestone, Ph.D, current President of The Women Presidents' Organization writes in her Foreword: ‘Women in the past century have made magnificent strides...[t]he women in this book are magnificent -- not because of what they have accumulated or even because of what they have accomplished -- but because of who they have become. These powerful stories...encourage each of us to seek our own new sense of self...’

& I wholeheartedly agree. Each woman's story will resonate with any Reader's own struggles -- starting from childhood, learning how to be an adult, a wife, a mother, a business woman & then, inevitably, the descent into the pit & the crawling back out.

The women in Nine Lives are:
• Rebecca Boenigk, CEO of the only woman-owned business ever to trade on NASDAQ, who decided it wasn't the way she wanted to run her company, & went private again.

• Barbara Armand, while brilliant at math & science, struggled to get through college & wound up building a successful professional services firm.

• Van Eure inherited The Angus Barn from her father in 1988 & transformed it into a world famous restaurant, along the way creating a community.

• Adrian Guglielmo, raised in a predominantly deaf family, started a creative firm staffed entirely by disabled employees, & rebuilt it after 9/11.

• Marcia Reynolds reached rock bottom before her 20th birthday, & thrived over the next twenty years by coaching executives & ordinary folks into being all they could be.

• Donna Myers, high in an advertising agency had to watch younger men being promoted through the glass ceiling. That prompted her to start her own food marketing agency.

• Judy Schmitt, as a missionary, remembered the adage about teaching a man to fish. She moved to Kentucky to bring industry to an unemployed community by starting a manufacturing plant.

• Nikki Olyai, CEO of a multi-million-dollar technology firm, brought into the boardroom a different kind of process that made both change & success possible.

• Judy Rosenberg was a deprived child who, as an adult, started a chain of bakeries that would satisfy our need for beauty & self-indulgence.

Each story is vibrant & unselfconscious, although a couple were a bit embarrassed to recount their failures & in doing so, handed down their greatest lessons -- pick yourself up, dust yourself off, & look for another way of doing things.

Highly recommended reading!

Mary Cantando is herself a business owner, she is a nationally recognized expert on the growth of women-owned business. Her company works exclusively with women who aspire to advance to the next level. Mary is a featured speaker of the National Speakers' Assocation. She is certified by the Women's Business Enterprise National Council & is a facilitator for the Women Presidents' Organization. She serves as an advisor & cheerleader to women business owners everywhere.
(10/26/03)

Rebecca