Your Name: Brooke Stone
Business Name: Brooke Stone Lifestyle Management, a provider of personal support personnel
Type of Business: Coaching & Consulting
Business Location: New York, New York, United States
Website brookestonelifestylemanagement.com
Twitter @bslmnyc
Facebook www.facebook.com/BrookeStoneLifestyleManagement
Reason for starting
I started Brooke Stone Lifestyle Management after experiencing first hand the difference strong support means to everyone trying to live life to the fullest. Everyone is busy and deserves extra, highly capable hands on deck to help with day to day tasks that can easily become overwhelming. I love to help people, and I realized how joyful it is for me, my clients and our employees to work together in partnership to streamline the daily workings of life.
How do you define success?
Success to me is directly related to happiness. There is no definition of success in my world that is measurable on anyone else’s terms. If I feel content, happy, calm and free, I am successful. If I am not feeling these things, I get to the root of the problem, and systematically work my way back to living successfully. For some people success may be measured by how much money they make, or how many things they own. To me, if that money and those things make me feel content, happy, calm and free than sure, they make me feel successful, but no more successful than I feel on a really productive sunny day.
Biggest Success
My biggest success is assembling a team of personal assistants who are able to work with our clients on a level that truly changes lives. Finding great people to embrace the vision of your company and uphold it’s values and reputation is difficult, and I have been extremely lucky to do just that since I started Brooke Stone Lifestyle Management. Keeping these wonderful employees happy, engaged and moving forward is my biggest success thus far.
What is your top challenge and how have you addressed it?
The biggest challenge I have faced in starting my company is learning to delegate and prioritize. I’m full of big huge ideas, and not so full of time to make them all happen at once! I address and face this challenge daily by learning to catalogue all of these ideas, prioritize them one by one, and make a solid, actionable plan for execution. I take deep breaths, slow myself down and go one step at a time, learning along the way what is truly the most important thing at each moment, and who on my team I can delegate responsibility to, in order to keep things moving forward.
Who is your most important role model?
Most important is a lot of pressure! I have a few. I will start with Barbra Streisand. As a former musical theater performer, and daughter of two Barbra devotees, I have long admired her story and her perseverance. She is a true example of hard work, extraordinary skill and big heart coming together to achieve great things. For many of the same reasons I will also mention Oprah (I’m not the only one, I know!), and Beyonce, because they are also strong, independent women who made goals and step by step, worked towards achieving them. Also i