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Marketers Navigate The Rocky Road of Entrepreneurship

"You've got to take the good with the bad," a camp counselor of mine used to say, and that seems to be what ex-marketing execs turned entrepreneurs are learning, if two separate stories in the Journal this morning be our guide.

In the first, Dawn Fallik introduces us to Jim Barbour, a marketing and drama major at the University of North Carolina who had careers in sales and marketing at Sony Music, GlaxoSmithKline and some friends' furniture store before his inner chef grabbed him by the gullet. FunniBonz, a sweet and tangy barbeque sauce, was the result. Using his thespian skills, Barbour sold $10,000 worth of the product in six weeks at in-store demos at his hometown supermarket. Now, thanks to persistence, FunniBonz is stocked in 21 Whole Foods stores in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions.

But Sarah E. Needleman's story makes it clear that running your own show is not exactly a day, or more, at the beach. Richard Abels, a recently self-employed marketing and communications consultant, finds that he no longer has the luxury of taking time off. "I can't report losses the way big companies do," he says. He and other freelancers quoted in the story find that if they don't reply to job leads immediately, they dry up.

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