Telling Your Nonprofit's Story with Dawn Gluskin
Dawn Gluskinhas spent the past 12 years in the electronic distribution field. In 2008, she became Founder and CEO of SolTec Electronics, an independent distributor and procurement partner to OEM and EMS companies for hard-to-find and obsolete electronic components. A true entrepreneur story, she started SolTec by herself, working from her home office (when her first born daughter was just 6 months old) and quickly grew the company from $0 into a multimillion dollar revenue generating firm. As one of the pioneers in the movement to detect counterfeit components and clean up the supply chain, combined with a strong social media presence, SolTec achieved much notoriety in the industry during their 6 years in business.
She has brought her accounts & expertise over to North Shore Components, an industry-leader in the counterfeit detection & avoidance movement with an ISO/IEC 17025 certified on-site test facility, OEM excess inventory in house, and AS6081, AS9120, and CCAP-101 certifications.
Read the Interview Hugh Ballou: I met Dawn at Shannon’s Business Acceleration Summit. Dawn is also a presenter at CEO Space. She’s gone from zero to 97 in about three seconds. Her sweet spot, Dawn, tell us a little bit about your background and why do you do this? What is it that you do? Tell us a little bit about that and why.
Dawn Gluskin: Sure. Thank you. Yes, I’m Dawn Gluskin, and my company is called Blissed Communications. I help entrepreneurs and nonprofits and leaders tell their stories that need to be heard in the world. I do this because it’s a really brilliant, powerful form of marketing. If you want to connect with the heart of your people, if you want to move people, if you want to impact people, you have to be a good storyteller. You have to be open and vulnerable. That is where all the connection and the magic happens. I teach this. I also work with people one on one to help them write their signature stories or website copy. All that good stuff. I also help them through their mindset and get to the heart of who they are. Sometimes, why people don’t tell their story is because either they don’t think they have a good one, they’re not interesting enough, nobody cares, or they’re scared to tell it, people are going to judge me, all that stuff as well.
You, Hugh, asked how this got to be my message and my mission. That is actually a great story. I always knew I would be a writer when I grew up until the world convinced me I would never make any money doing that. So I went to school for business instead. That is what got me started in sales and marketing. I have been doing that in some capacity for the last 20 years. My journey took me accidentally into the fabulous ultra-sexy world of selling electronic components. I did that for 15 years. I was selling semiconductors to Fortune 500 companies. Made a lot of good money doing that. Started my own business. Went from zero to $3 million in revenue in our first two years. I always tell everyone I had five great years in that business. We were open for seven. Long, painful story short, ended up having to shut that business down. We lost a lot of money and couldn’t keep the doors open anymore. We had some government regulations come down that affected our bottom line. I went from zero to $3 million back to zero again. I carried a lot of shame around that. What’s next? I had to go back and work for one of my old competitors while I tried to get my life together. I realized two things. I was the same person who still achieved all of this stuff in the first place. Sometimes we have a failure happen, and we think all the good stuff we’ve ever done has been wiped out. I never wanted to sell electronic components when I grew up anyway. I wanted to write and to help people.
So what ended up happening is I decided to write a blog post for The Huffington Postcalled “The Power of Owning Your Story.” The premise was either you own your story, or it own