How did C.J. Walker become the first African-American woman in the US National Business Hall of Fame? In 1905, with just $1.50, Walker opened the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the nation’s first successful black-haircare products firm, in Indianapolis. She hired a staff of 50 and trained thousands of women at her beauty school. Eventually, she employed a sales force of 20,000 in the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America. How did she do it? The self-made millionaire once said, “There is no royal flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it, for if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard.”

Excerpted from Be In It to Win, part of the Selling Power Success Library published by McGraw-Hill. For more information, go to www.sellingpower.com/bookstore or your local bookseller.