Michelle Lemmons in Inc Magazine

The Accidental Bootstrapper

One way to start a business without spending a lot of money or agonizing over strategy is to follow Michelle Lemmons-Poscente’s example. Not that you could set out to follow her example; she started her company pretty much by accident.

Seven years ago Lemmons-Poscente was a struggling independent film producer in Los Angeles, scrambling for a second job to pay the bills. She answered a classified ad in Variety placed by two people–a humorist and a tax strategist–who were both looking for an agent to market them as public speakers. Although Lemmons-Poscente had no experience of the kind, she talked her way into the job. “Selling comes naturally to me,” she explains. She succeeded in booking several engagements for the tax strategist, earning an hourly rate plus commissions. Then in September 1992 she moved back to her hometown of San Angelo, Tex., to help care for her father, who was critically ill. Reckoning that she might still earn some bread money as a booking agent, she borrowed $1,000 from the tax strategist and bought a cheap computer.

Operating out of a spare bedroom in her parents’ home, she cold-called state associations and chain businesses, still hustling to cover expenses. “It’s a small town, so I could set up accounts,” she recalls. “If I had done this in L.A., they never would have printed my letterhead without my paying for it first.” To earn a bit of quick money, she gathered pecans from her front lawn for sale at a local farmers’ market.

Slowly, her work as a booking agent caught on–her first break was signing Charles Kuralt to speak at a Super 8 Motel conference–but she viewed the work as a way to make ends meet while looking after her father. In 1993, a few months after her father’s death, Lemmons-Poscente moved to Dallas. She kept a hand in the film business while frugally expanding her speakers’ agency.

In mid-1994, Lemmons-Poscente had her epiphany: “The real gem was right under my nose. I said, ‘I’m not in the film business. I’m in the speakers’ bureau business, and that’s what I enjoy.’” Now her company, International Speakers Bureau Inc., employs 20 people and projects it will make $7 million in sales this year to such customers as Sprint, IBM, and Microsoft.