Warning: If you’re not at all interested in starting your own business, you may want to skip this post. (But please feel free to use it for our usual coffee break threadjack!) If you are, though, read on — whether you’re pondering an online business, a services-based business, or more. Basically, I have an online course to recommend: Marie Forleo’s B-School — and I think it would be really fun to start a private Facebook group for Corporette readers who are going through the program at the same time. The program is a great overview (honestly) of so many different aspects of business for solopreneurs or small businesses. The program just opened for enrollment (it ends March 1) so I thought today would be a good day to mention it! (Read on for more details…)

This post contains affiliate links and Corporette® may earn commissions for purchases made through links in this post. For more details see here. Thank you so much for your support!

Update: I’m bummed to see your comments (but thank you for reading!). For the record: when I was a lawyer in 2008 with a business idea for a blog, I randomly found an online class from a guy I’d never heard of before — Yaro Starak. In those days it was about 12 MP3 files that I downloaded to iTunes. The class was $600 or so, which seemed reasonable considering the $800 or so I’d just spent on a humor writing class.  I’ve always marveled at my luck in finding the class because it was really helpful in getting me started. The class isn’t offered anymore, as far as I know, but I’ve taken many, many, many classes online since then. Trust me when I say that B-School is legitimately a good course, and that the price is right for it. In the almost 10 years that I’ve successfully run an online business, this is the only course I’ve told you guys about (amidst all the shoes and books and podcasts and other things I recommend) in large part because this class reminded me so much of that class I took with Yaro so long ago — it’s great advice for all levels — and I thought it really would be fun to go through with women who come from my background of law school or other similar degrees. And yes, I paid full price for B-school last year (and signed up through Hilary Rushford since I felt her sign-up best addressed what I wanted to learn last year).

Yes, like many other things on this blog, I do get an affiliate cut from signups, as per our disclosure. Some affiliates of this course probably do make a big chunk of their earnings from the affiliate money they make off this class (just like a lot of bloggers make their living by blogging about blogging and selling Bluehost signups). A lot of commenters below are mistakenly disparaging B-school as an MLM course — but there are thousands of B-Schoolers who just take the advice and apply it to their business and never tell anyone about the program (because it’s a great program!); there’s absolutely no pressure to sell the course after you take it. I’m not intimately familiar with how “MLM businesses” work but with most I would assume that once Seller1 gets you in the door they want you to buy more and importantly, pressure you to become Seller2, building a pyramid beneath you so that Seller1 profits from the revenues of Seller2, 3, 4, etc. None of that exists in the B-school course — it’s a straight affiliate sale; specifically the last click. The person I bought from in 2017 won’t get a cut of any of my sales; if you sign up from me in 2018 and choose to sell it in 2019 I won’t get a cut from your sales. Almost every link on this blog is an affiliate link, as we try to disclose fully and regularly.  See my further comments below; I’ve also updated other points in this post for clarity.)

As others have noted in comments, there are a lot of great online business and management classes, many of which we’ve profiled before; if your goal is to advance in your current corporate career, get a continuing education certificate or something else to put on your resume, or even to launch The Next Big Thing with outside funding, this is not for you — B-school is more suited for the kind of person who wants to start a lifestyle business and be a solopreneur or small business owner. There are absolutely great resources out there for free on the Internet (if you’re interested on my thoughts on this kind of thing sign up here for my personal email list as I keep meaning to round them up and it’s pretty clear readers don’t want it here); the value of Marie Forleo’s course is that it collects everything together in a coherent manner, presents it well, and covers the “you don’t know what you don’t know” problem by bundling it as a course and then giving you substantial resources in the FB group.

I’ll try to address some of the other comments elsewhere as soon as possible. As always, thank you for reading!

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Thank you guys so much for taking the survey — the giveaway is now closed, but if you want to weigh in you can still take the survey.  (I’m always grateful for feedback!)

I used Random.org to determine who won the giftcards — the first winner was #9, but that survey taker had not left her email address. The next random number generated was 1572, and the next random number generated was 436 — both of those survey takers have been contacted.

Results didn’t change much from the interim survey results. Final numbers were:

• Age: 33% of you are 28-32, with 26% of you being 33-37.
• Relationships: 60% of you are married, 18% in a relationship, and 18% single.
• Kiddos: 44% of you don’t have any children yet, and 20% don’t plan to have any.
• Salary: 45% of you make at least 6 figures.
• Degrees: 43% of you have JDs, and 9% of you have MBAs.
• Career: 40% of you say you’ve been working 3-8 years in the same career.
• Office environment: 58% of you said you worked in a “business casual” environment (defined in the survey as “for men, no tie but a tucked button-front shirt and khakis; women may wear blazers but usually as separates”), with 31% saying “business conservative” (defined in the survey as “men may wear a tie but keep their suit jacket in their office; women may or may not wear full suits often”) and 20% saying “California business” (defined in the survey as “people may wear blazers with jeans”).
  • 48% of you have your own office, while 28% work in a cubicle or other shared office space.
• Size-wise: 47% of you identified as a size M, 40% as small, and 29% as large. (Multiple choices were allowed on this Q and a few others so the percentages may be a bit screwy.)
• Thoughts on Kat’s style: 74% of you liked my choices “sometimes,” with the chief complaint (35%) being that choices were too expensive.
• Visiting the blog: The majority of readers visit Corporette once a day (35%), 30% visit a few times a week, and 21% visit multiple times a day.
• Blog comments: 36% of readers said they read the comments either “always” or “usually,” while 30% of readers said they read comments sometimes, and 26% said only if they were very interested in the subject matter of the main post.
• Current blog content: In general most people thought the mix of current blog content was just right. 33% thought more beauty advice was needed, 37% thought more career/job advice would be good, and 35% wanted more financial advice.
  • The most loved features were the Hunt (67% loved it), Weekly News Roundups (50% loved it), Tales from the Wallet (49% loved it).
  • I also asked for readers’ thoughts on a certain commenter in particular (rhymes with Shmellen): 38% had no opinion, 23% hated, 23% thought “it’s fine”, and 15% “loved” it. (I’m kinda surprised by these answers!)
• Expanding blog content: We had a lot of ideas for ways to expand the content that we swung by you guys — the most popular was “interviews with regular working women” (61%), while roughly 48% of people also liked the ideas for more posts from Kate, short interviews with Big Name businesswomen, or guest “house” bloggers for fashion or jobs.
• 79% of people answering the survey had commented on Corporette 10 times or less, but 30% of people said they came primarily for the comments section.
• Future Corporette projects (in addition to/outside of the blog): The biggest hits among our many ideas for outside projects were meetups, a podcast, a “Corporette Seal of Approval,” ebooks, a paper Career Planner, and job listings.

Stay tuned while we explore these new avenues — and thank you guys again for your feedback!  For some reason one of the projects I’ve started first was a paper Career Planner — I’m hoping to have a beta form available for download at least by the end of the summer. If you’d like to sign up to be notified of the planner when it comes out (and likely be offered a big discount on whatever initial price we attach to it), please sign up here.

Pictured: balloons, originally uploaded to Flickr by Ilario Prospero.

Hi guys — our survey is still open and you’re still welcome to enter the giveaway (through June 24!) but I just thought I’d round up a few interim results (with more than 2000 readers taking the survey!). If these answers don’t sound like you and you haven’t taken the survey yet, please do so to make sure your voice is heard!

• Age: 33% of you are 28-32, with 26% of you being 33-37.
• Relationships: 60% of you are married, 18% in a relationship, and 18% single.
• Kiddos: 44% of you don’t have any children yet, and 20% don’t plan to have any.
• Salary: 45% of you make at least 6 figures.
• Degrees: 45% of you have JDs, and 8% of you have MBAs.
• Career: 41% of you say you’ve been working 3-8 years in the same career.
• Office environment: 57% of you said you worked in a “business casual” environment, with 30% saying “business conservative” and 20% saying “California business.”
  48% of you have your own office, while 27% work in a cubicle or other shared office space.

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Happy Wednesday, ladies! I’m always honored and humbled by this website and its fantastic community of bright women. As you know, from time to time I like to check in with you guys to see how we’re doing and whether we could be doing any better on content or other ways to serve the audience — and to that end, I’ve put together a little survey. (We haven’t had one since May 2013!) I always appreciate the time and thought it takes to answer these things, so I thought I’d do a little giveaway along with the survey — if you answer all of the questions and provide us with contact info, you will be entered for a chance to win one of two $250 Amazon gift cards! June 25 Update: the giveaway is closed! But you can still take the survey if you’d like to. 

Click here to take the survey!

Click here to take the survey!

Click here to take the survey!

(No, I have not been wasting any time on Perez Hilton lately, officer.) 

If you’re curious, the last survey results told us:

• 35.7% of our readers are ages 28-32; the next largest grouping is 25.8% of you ages 23-27.
• 35.4% of our readers spent $151-$300 on clothes last month (with 2.4% spending more than $1K)
• 74.7% of our readers have no kids; and 51.3% of our readers are married or in a civil union.
• 50.2% of our readers have a JD or are in the midst of attaining it.
• 83.1% of our readers work full time; of those who work full time, 32.2% of them make over $100K.

* While I’d like to hear from ALL readers, please note that due to legal reasons, the giveaway is only open to U.S. readers, age 18 or older. The giveaway will end at 12:01 AM ET on June 24, 2016. There will only be two winners; they will be randomly selected by Kat and notified by email. (Email or other contact info is required to enter the giveaway; please note that we will only contact you if you win.) If the first winners do not respond within one week, a new winner or winners will be selected.

Admin Update: The place to enter your email address (and enter the giveaway) is the final question on the survey form (the last page that is titled “This is the End, My Friends”) — if you for some reason miss it or don’t get a chance to enter your email address, you can do either of these two things from the same computer you used to take the survey: a) email me using the Contact Form, or b) leave a comment on this post with your email address is the “email field” (not the body of the post).  (Tech background here: the survey grabs your IP address so you can’t take the survey 10 times (because you know you want to!); the commenting system and contact form also both grab your IP address as well, so I can link them.)

Pictured: balloons, originally uploaded to Flickr by Ilario Prospero.