HATTIE: (Voiceover) You probably have the book or at least have heard of it.
I bought my copy in 1982 and then found an expert to help choose the right colors for me.

Unidentified Man #5: With the "Color Me Beautiful" system, you'll never make a fashion mistake. You'll always be in the right colors.

HATTIE: And look at you. You're in the right color. Eew, so green.

Unidentified Woman #2: That happens when you instantly see lines and shadows that weren't there just a moment ago.

HATTIE: Ah! Get away!

(Voiceover) The author, Carole Jackson, knew she needed help when her ideas captivated the imaginations of so many.

STEVE DiANTONIO: She needed a businessperson to come in and help, and I happened to be the right person at the right time.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) What started with the best-selling book and the offer by Carole to send anyone who requested it a pallet of colors is now a small but full-blown cosmetics company, which experienced a 30 percent rate of growth last year.

HATTIE: Here are my colors. This is what you'll see me in.

Isn't there somebody over here that could help me get what I needed?

Man #5: Well, we have an 800 number that allows customers that aren't in the vicinity of a J.C. Penney or Sears stores to call us directly.

HATTIE: And what is that number?

Unidentified Woman #3: It's 1 (800) 533-5503.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) But what is Steve DiAntonio, a macho graduate of Annapolis with a PhD from the Wharton School of Business, doing selling makeup?

STEVE: Well, first of all, I like what we do.

(Voiceover) We offer our customers the opportunity to learn their best colors, and then we sell 'em makeup, which really can make a big difference in how our clients look.

But we're really in the helping one improve her self-esteem business. That's what "Color Me Beautiful" is all about and that's what's so appealing about a career with "Color Me Beautiful."

HATTIE: Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night worried about money?

STEVE: Yes, there were plenty of nights when I woke up in the middle of the night and said, `Oh, my God, are we going to make it? Are we going to be able to make cash flow? What about my family? What's gonna happen to 'em? Are we gonna be in a tent?' So that's another point I'd like to make to the entrepreneur or would-be entrepreneur: If you decide to grow the business--and these days there aren't any businesses or strategies that are easy--I mean, a lot of it is you figure out who you are and then you execute and you execute and you be demanding and you have good people around you. And you're taking a risk. There's no way around it, you're taking a risk. And that's hard.

HATTIE: When the cash was thin or not there, did you just go down to your friendly banker and ask for $500,000?

STEVE: When cash is thin, the bankers aren't that friendly. All right? So, really, what you do is you work with your suppliers, you work with your customers. You convince them that you're going to make it. It really boils down to that. And we were able to convince our suppliers that we were going to make it. And there was a time, back in 1989, when we couldn't pay them, but we needed to have the merchandise. We needed to have product shipped to us. We already owed 'em money. We weren't paying 'em.

HATTIE: Well, what did you say to them to get them to ship? I want to know your sales pitch to them. What did you say?

STEVE: We went up and we looked 'em in the eye and we said, `We are going to make it,' and, you know, `Believe in us. And here's how we're going to do it. And all I need is this much more and I will pay you this much by then.' And then it wasn't a great, appealing story. You know, it was going to be six months for them to start getting paid, but then we did it.

HATTIE: Why didn't you quit?

STEVE: Quitting's not an option, but in addition to that, I mean, that's kind of having your back against the wall kind of mentality. And there's a lot of power in having your back against the wall because you know where you're going. You're gonna come out fighting and you know what you're gonna to do. It really helps clarify your thinking.

But in addition to that, as I said earlier, we really love what we do here. It's really a great feeling to be helping people and reading those kind of letters and hearing from our consultants about what we're doing for our clients. And I believe and believed in what we were doing. Our products are excellent. Our service is excellent. We do it better than anyone else in the world. And all through those tough times I believed that there had to be a way for a company with those kinds of qualities to succeed.

Our strategy for growth is basically to not compete head-to-head with the big companies, all right?

(Voiceover) We invest all of our marketing dollars, all of our sales dollars, all of our energy into making the beauty adviser the hero.

But we made a strategic decision that we were gonna compete this way, get close to the customer, get close to our accounts. And to do that, we really had to invest in technology. And at that point we could have done it sort of piecemeal through the personal computers, but we decided to invest in an IBM AS-400, which is a small business system but more sophisticated than the personal computer. It cost us about the same as a senior manager.

(Voiceover) We believe in running lean as an organization. I'd much rather have people working too hard than not working as hard as they--and then creating stuff to do.

We like to pay well because we want people who are motivated by that. And the other thing we do is we try very hard to create the right climate. So we're gonna continue doing what we're doing, all right, but we're gonna do it better.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Here's what I learned from Steve. If your first marketing idea doesn't work, try another one. Invest heavily in the sales force, and don't try to go toe-to-toe with the big guys. `Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again'--Goethe.

HOST: Do you get swamped with business cards? Everywhere I go, someone gives me a business card. What do you do with them? We put that question to our home office expert, Lisa Kanarek, in this week's Homework.

The Closing of the Show.