Posted Under: Entrepreneurship, Our Heroes

Mary Pierce Brosmer is our next guest under the “Our Heroes” series. Mary was once a tenured English teacher who held an impeccable employment record, but after a heated controversy with the chair of the school board and fighting for what she believed in, she quit her job and took the plunge into entrepreneurship. Let’s hear how it all happened…

DD: Who are you and what kind of corporate job were you at?

MPB: I am a social entrepreneur, founder of Women Writing for (a) Change*, Consulting for (a) Change, Young Women Writing for (a) Change, The Feminist Leadership Academy of Cincinnati and producer of Women Writing for (a) Change on the Radio*.   Published poet, author of a book about the business I founded: Women Writing for (a) Change: A Guide for Creative Transformation (Sorin Press, Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, IN)

*Six licensed schools in Burlington VT, Bloomington IN, Grand Junction CO, Indianapolis IN, Traverse City MI, Birmingham AL;

**seven years on NPR affiliate, WVXU, fm, 91.7, now an internet radio show on www.womenwriting.org

I am a career teacher of Literature and Creative Writing, MA English, mother, grandmother, and wife.

DD: What made you leave the job? When did you realize that you wanted to be an entrepreneur & why?

MPB: My fork in the road was both gradual and climactic.

(a) Gradually I realized that I was participating in a dead, not a living , system. Thus, all efforts to allow and foster needed changes in the system were futile, and that I could choose to bitch and moan about it, or leave and create an alternative

(b) The sign from the universe I needed was a painful and very public censorship controversy in which the chair of the school board, a fundamentalist Christian, waged war against me for using the book Writing Down the Bones as a supplemental text in my Creative Writing class for Juniors and Seniors in high school.  I fought back; I was supported by the community but not by administration.  I was not fired because I was a tenured teacher with an impeccable record of service and publication.  I quit.

DD: What did you do to break the corporate jail? How did you prepare yourself for the employee to entrepreneur transition?

MPB: I was the single mother of a teenaged son.  I was prepared to do what I knew I wanted to do by my years of writing and performing my own poetry and my years of teaching.  I was unprepared as I had no formal business background.  I never had a business plan because I never borrowed money. I used a $10,000 savings as a cushion for the first months of self-employment.  Eventually I created a training program out of the steps I took to launch my business, sharing the reading, the resources and insights and creative/ values-driven practices I used to create my world and to go on creating it  (so it would not become another “dead” system).

I want to emphasize this:  I came from a working class family from whom I learned the lessons of generosity, hard work, focus, and toughing it out. But I did not have ANY financial fall-back in the way of personal or family wealth to help me.  No one I ever knew owned anything–we were the worker bees, so I didn’t grow up with what Malcolm Gladwell calls “procedural intelligence,”(from his book Outliers) a healthy sense of entitlement that helps you navigate easily through society and get what you want and need from it.  But I had common sense, and integrity.

My greatest challenge?  The inner voice of “who do you think you are” meeting the external voices of “who do you think you are?”

DD: What are your top five tips for employers who want to be entrepreneurs but are hung up on something?

MPB: Tips, gimmicks, and top five anything will not help you.

What will help you and sustain you:  knowing what you know, feeling what you feel, acting on your knowledge and feelings to create what is yours to create, tweaking and revising your creation as it grows, nurturing it as if it were your child, nurturing yourself as if you were the parent on whom everything rests, telling the truth at all times, looking for the help you need and being willing to pay people to help you do what you cannot do, connecting every detail of your business to the kind of world you want to live in.

DD: How are you now? Are you still in the same business, and how do you feel?

MPB: After eighteen years, I am still doing the same work, but in a different role.  As of Jan 1, 2010, I am no longer the buck-stops-here owner.  I sold all the assets of the business, EXCEPT for Consulting for (a) Change, to the nonprofit arm of the business to take into the next generation.   I believe this form of the business will be good for the work, but I never had a desire—nor the ability—as an entrepreneur–to work under a board of trustees.

I feel like a million bucks!  (I never made a million bucks–nor had a desire to do so) I wanted—and earned—enough to create a sweet life, without debt, but with comfort and adequate security for myself and my now-grown son. )  I have touched thousands of lives through the art of creating places of people to CREATE good lives, businesses, and organizations through the Art of Writing and the Practices of Community—and the Art of Entrepreneurship and Living Systems Leadership.)

I did what was mine to do, and–at age 61—I still am.  Not bad, not bad at all!

DD: That was the creative Mary Pierce Brosmer folks. After 18 years in the same field, Mary is still blossoming and says she feels like a million bucks! I think we can learn a lot from the sophisticated way Mary took her life into her own hands…I especially loved when she said “Tips, gimmicks and top five anything will not help you…what will help you and sustain you [is] acting on your knowledge and feelings to create what is yours to create”. Be true to yourself and stay focused on your goals and good things will come your way!