Bring a Cardboard Cutout Man to the Bargaining Table

Moms are entrepreneurs, too, and as one California mother discovered, the first law of negotiating is “Break the Rules, Break the Rules, Break the Rules!”

Julia Rhodes, a single mom just getting by on her teaching salary a few years ago, invented a dry eraser that is attachable to a whiteboard marker (she had grown tired of erasing the board with her hand!).  KleenSlate Concepts is now a manufacturer of internationally distributed products used in schools worldwide.

When someone told her that a woman with a single product couldn’t sell it to retailers without a man accompanying her, she cut out a man’s head from a whiteboard and glued it to a popsicle stick so she’d have a “man” with her at the negotiating table.