Keys to Business Success with My Wife Sara Blakely

Failure is a part of everyone’s journey. The most successful people have a vision, create a plan, and stick to it no matter how much fear or failure they have or experience.

Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, started with $5,000 and a dream and turned it into a billion-dollar business while balancing family and friends.

In an interview with her husband, Jesse Itzler, Sara shared some of the keys to her success.

Lemons Out of Lemonade

Sara said she grew up wanting to be a lawyer because her dad was a trial attorney, but she was a terrible test-taker and after she bombed the LSAT twice, she changed the trajectory of her life. She said when bad things happen, they often feel like the worst thing ever but they often push us to our true purpose.

Sara went to work at Disney for 3 months before taking a job selling fax machines for 7 years. She said she was kicked out of business every day, and one day decided she was in the wrong movie and wanted to do something different.

Self-Discovery

Sara said she asked herself what she was good at, and when she decided on sales, she asked herself why - Why did she like sales? She said she likes giving something to someone that they didn’t know they needed or improved their life. 

Sara then wrote, “I want to invent something that I can sell to millions of people that will make them feel good.” She then said to the universe, “If you give me the idea, I won’t squander it,” and two years later, she found the idea of Spanx.

Sara said she was ready for it because she had set the intention prior, and she spent the next 2 years working nights and weekends building Spanx while still selling fax machines to keep her income coming in.

She said some of the best inventions come from everyday problems and asks why we have them and how we can fix them.

Sara also said entrepreneurs do one of 2 things:

• They invent something new

• They find new, better ways of doing something.

When Sara was asked whether or not she thought it was going to work, she said she knew it would because it not working wasn’t an option, but she felt a lot of internal and external validation.

After inventing Spanx, she was quickly chosen as Oprah’s favorite product of the year which was great validation for her and free advertising.

She said she knew she would be on Oprah in college, and manifestation has been an important part of her journey. She can see her success so clearly that she just has to figure out how to fill in the blanks.

Sara spends a lot of time daydreaming and letting her mind wander. She finds time on her calendar to daydream and let her mind wander.

She says it’s important to find ways to capture your ideas because ideas are gifts from the universe.

When she was 16, her dad gave her a tape from Wayne Dyer titled How to Be a No Limit Person. He was a psychologist who put all of his work and observations into teaching mindset and becoming a motivational speaker.

It came during a tough time in her life, and she said the dark times in our lives are where growth happens. She said those dark times created the space where she was willing to less to Wayne, and if she wasn’t in a tough place, she probably wouldn’t have been open to listening to tapes like that.

Purpose: Make it Bigger Thank Yourself

Sara says she always makes what she is doing bigger than herself because that is how you find the courage than you ever had and you will stick with something longer and go through more.

She said supporting and uplifting women are the purposes that are bigger than yourself.

Be a Pole Vaulter

My biggest takeaway from this entire interview came from Sara’s dad. He said as a trial lawyer, he learned about how important it is to learn how to fail.

He said pole vaulters don’t know their limits until they fail. They keep raising the bar higher and higher until they reach their limits by hitting and knocking down the bar three times in a row, but they don’t stop raising the bar until they do.

If they fail and hit the bar once or twice, they don’t quit, they just try again and keep raising the bar.

That is what we need to do in life - keep raising the bar until we fail multiple times, then reset, see what we need to learn, get better, then try again.