From Musician to CEO
Makes 10 times her old income
Success strategy: "I don't throw up my hands at a challenge. My first thought is, how can we do it?"
Nine years ago Teri Gault, then 39, of Santa Clarita, California, was singing background vocals, teaching music, performing, and dreaming of winning a Grammy. She says she was also "running my tail off for very little." To stretch her tiny income, she spent hours clipping coupons and scouring ads for sales, saving about $100 on each shopping trip. But the work was tedious and time consuming. One day, she realized that if she had the money she'd gladly pay someone to do the job for her. Her next thought was, what if people paid me? Ca-ching: The Grocery Game (thegrocerygame.com) was born.
Gault envisioned the Grocery Game as a Web site that would offer regional lists of supermarket deals, coupons in local papers, and special offers. Members would save hundreds of dollars on groceries by paying a $10 to $20 fee every eight weeks to access their local lists. On her 40th birthday, Gault bought herself a business license with $65 she'd saved from spare change. She found a company that offered free Web hosting services for three months and, with help from its tech support team, taught herself to build a Web site. "From midnight to four in the morning, they were bored and they'd teach me how to do it," Gault says. "That was my schedule for about two weeks." She took out an ad in a local paper for three weeks, and after that, word of mouth took over. "Soon after I launched the site, I'd heard from shoppers in almost every state in the country, wondering if I had lists for their area," she says. She began the process of franchising her business, and in three years the Grocery Game was available in every state. These days it's especially active. "We are the kind of business that does well in a recession," she understates.
As the CEO of a company that grosses more than $12 million a year, Gault pays herself a salary that's more than 10 times what she made as a musician. "It's wonderful to be able to call a plumber and not cry if the bill comes to $350," she says. She still performs music but only takes gigs she loves. Although the Grammy dream is history, "That's okay," she says. "I'm enjoying life in a totally different way now."
