Recently, I had a chance to visit a company owned by an entrepreneur who had come to me for advice almost 20 years ago. Her name is Anisa Telwar Kaicker, and she is a designer, packager, and marketer of cosmetics accessories–such as brushes and bags–that she sells to beauty brands, department stores, and high-end specialty retailers. When I first met her, she had been in business for roughly five years and was doing about $1.5 million in sales, but she was having trouble paying her bills.
The problem, she thought, was that she didn’t have enough sales. The real problem, however, was that she didn’t know how to gather the information she needed to understand what was actually happening in her business.
