{Freedom to Read Giveaway Hop} Raising Eyebrows by Dal LaMagna

Raising Eyebrows: A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets It Right by Dal LaMagna

Amazon.com: Hardcover | Paperback | Kindle Edition

First things first ... do you have a pair of tweezers? If you do (because I sure do!), then this book and author will intrigue you!

I am featuring a non-fiction book which is part memoir and part business book. The author is the epitome of the American Dream, an entrepreneur who has failed yet had picked himself up and made something of himself and his company, and then some. Mr. Dal LaMagna is a strong advocate of businesses with a conscience.  Let's welcome Mr. Tweezerman, Dal La Magna, himself to Guiltless Reading!

As part of the Freedom to Read Giveaway Hop, up for grabs are two hardcovers of the book Raising Eyebrows (open US/Can) ... with a free red Tweezers! (Courtesy of Dal la Magna)

Raising Eyebrows: A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets It Right
by Dal LaMagna aka Tweezerman

By the time I was 32 years old, I was $150,000 in debt and had attempted and failed at 15 different businesses. I had decided to stop trying new business ideas, get a job and think about what tragic flaw I might be suffering from that caused me to repeatedly fail. Trying to understand what mistakes I made each time, I wrote a chronology of all my failed projects. As this progressed I thought it could make an interesting book - something that someone else wanting to start a business could use as a guide. But then I realized few people would want to read a book only about failing – how depressing! I needed a success story to finish the book.

Having made every mistake one could make in business and identifying them all during that writing exercise, allowed me to not repeat these mistakes when I launched Tweezerman with a precision eyebrow tweezers and $500. The company worked from the start. It made a small profit immediately and grew to the point I could support myself and quit my job. It then grew slowly (over 25 years) to a 32 million dollars business making $3 million a year! I had had some pretty bad experiences being exploited by powerful businessmen in the past, and resolved that I would make money and not exploit anyone. I focused on how I could run the company in a way that benefited all its stakeholders, not just my shareholders and me. I started practicing what I called Responsible Capitalism. I empowered my employees, was loyal to my vendors, and gave a share of the profits to charity, while still giving a good return to my investors.

In 2004 I sold the company to J. A. Henckles, the German knife company. By that point my employees as a group owned 20% of the company and shared $12 million of the capital gain. They kept their jobs and the new owners continued to operate the company responsibly.

After the sale I went back to finish the book, working with my writer friends Wally and Carla Reuben Carbone. I wanted to inspire people to start their own businesses and help them learn from my mistakes. At the time we called the book “Failing To Get Ahead” – a clever way of say that I got ahead through my failures. My book editor at the Joseph Wiley Company, the publisher, came up with the idea of calling the book “Raising Eyebrows”. She argued it was a memoir of Tweezerman. The title sounded catchy but I feared people would see Tweezerman and think the book was about eyebrows not Business. So the Wiley people agreed to add the subtitle, “A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets It Right.” This sentence captured both the fact that the book was about learning through failure and also about doing business responsibly.

One thing I always tell people is not to fear failure when they are considering venturing into business but to actually fear success, because your goal should be to create a life you want to live. One of my “failures” was a restaurant I once took over which was losing money. I succeeded in turning it around but then found myself working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. I walked away from that business because I was miserable.

This book isn’t designed to be a business textbook although some teachers of entrepreneurship, small business, or corporate social responsibility, do have their students read it. The book is written as a narrative and is an easy fun read, at the end of which the reader learns an awful lot about how a small business can fail or succeed and how being responsible pays off.

Many people gift the book to some young person they know who has recently graduated to give them a view in the other possibility of find a job – i.e., creating your own job by starting a company.

Note: I think it is cool for people who buy the book to get a free Tweezerman Tweezers. So when you buy the book you will get a free Tweezerman worth $22.

About Dal La Magna

Website: www.dallamagna.com

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Dal LaMagna is known as Tweezerman. He founded the company in 1980 and built it into a multi-national, premier personal-care-tool brand that practices responsible capitalism and corporate social responsibility. Part of the company's mission is to benefit all stakeholders: including financial partners, employees, customers, vendors, the community and the natural environment.

Raising Eyebrows: A Failed Entrepreneur
Finally Gets It Right by Dal LaMagna

Amazon.com: Hardcover | Paperback | Kindle Edition

Giveaway Time!

Dal LaMagna is giving away 

2 Hardcovers of
Raising Eyebrows: A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets It Right by Dal LaMagna 

with free tweezers! (Open US/Can) 

Please use Rafflecopter below (please be patient, sometimes it takes a while to load)

a Rafflecopter giveaway  

Synopsis: The often hilarious and sometimes poignant story behind Dal LaMagna's rise in the beauty industry. By the time LaMagna graduated from the Harvard Business School, his entrepreneurial activities—including operating discotheques in drive-in theaters, working with the 1960s musical teen sensations the Cowsills, and opening an ice cream parlor on the Venice Beach boardwalk—had landed him $150,000 of debt.  

Raising Eyebrows tells the story of how he finally succeeded. After years of failures and living pennilessly, LaMagna founded Tweezerman, one of the world's most respected, innovative and successful beauty tool manufacturers with over 40 million customers. A leader for socially responsible companies, Tweezerman became a success by making helping communities and caring for the environment everyday practices, not publicity gimmicks. 

A responsible capitalist, LaMagna wrote this roller-coaster memoir for entrepreneurs who are struggling and disenchanted with the ever changing economic system Packed with business lessons, financial plans, and practical advice Raising Eyebrows is full of inspiration, conscience, and good ideas for entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs everywhere. 

Check out more stops on Freedom to Read Giveaway Hop! More books to win out there!