Consulting Roundtable

Starting and Growing a Successful Global Business

March 24, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Learn how Marilyn Miglin LP became a $50 million global business. Find out how to start a business and lead it to success. More Details.

Where:

Gleacher Center
Room 600
450 North Cityfront Plaza Drive
Chicago, IL

Who:

Marilyn Miglin
Founder & CEO
Marilyn Miglin LP

Program:

6:00 pm: Registration & Networking
6:30 pm: Program
8:00 pm Optional Social Hour (cash bar) at Midway Club

Cost:

No Charge

Registration:

Register Online

Karl Buschmann, '85
kbuschma@chicagobooth.edu

Questions:

Dennis Aust, 80
roundtable@virtualstrategist.net

Event Details:

Marilyn Miglin is founder, president, and CEO of the privately-held Marilyn Miglin LP, a fragrances, skin care, and cosmetics business she founded in 1963. In that year, despite strong reservations expressed by friends and business associates alike that such a business could flourish, Marilyn opened a 225-square foot cosmetics shop on Oak Street in Chicago.

Today, that business has grown into a strikingly successful global enterprise with annual revenues estimated at $50 million. With her daughter, Marlena, who is now Chief Operating Officer of Marilyn Miglin, L.P., Marilyn will discuss the fundamentals of starting and growing a global business. She will also talk about how her determination to succeed, intuitiveness grounded in common sense, and risk-taking nature became the pillars of her success as an entrepreneur, enabling her realize her business vision. While she insists that people should follow their dreams, she urges them to never forget that dreams still need a business plan.

In this interactive session, Marilyn and Marlena Miglin will talk about Marilyn Miglin L.P.'s past and ongoing business, marketing, and competitive challenges and how they have organized the company for success in the 21st century.

The topics to be covered include:

• The basics of starting a business
• Confronting business issues
• Why segmenting and targeting specific customer segments is critical to the marketing effort
• The importance of recognizing and responding to changing customer needs
• The importance of building and positioning the Miglin brand
• Using marketing research to understand customers’ decision-making process, competitors, and product-line strengths and weaknesses
• The decision to use multiple distribution channels
• Growing the business: diversification or consolidation to strengthen core businesses
• Customer relationship management strategy to build customer loyalty
• Planning for the company's future

Speaker Profiles

World-renowned beauty authority, author and speaker, Marilyn Miglin is among the nation's top-500 women business owners. Her signature fragrance, Pheromone, is among the top-10 fragrances sold in luxury department stores nationwide and each month, more than 65-million television viewers invite her into their homes to purchase her products.

Her list of achievements and honors, including the Raoul Wallenberg International Humanitarian Award, are many, but she is particularly beloved for what she gives back to the community. A founding member of the University of Illinois' advisory board for the Craniofacial Center, she is widely recognized for her work with the facially disfigured and burn survivors in addition to her efforts in establishing the Women of Destiny mentoring program for aspiring young women in their chosen professions.

Ms. Miglin is a formidable force on the side of charity and civic leadership-so much so, that the City of Chicago's most fashionable shopping boulevard is now officially named "Marilyn Miglin Way."

Marlena Miglin, COO of Marilyn Miglin, L.P, is busy carving her own professional niche in the Chicago-based beauty empire founded by her mother, Marilyn. Instilled with the same solid work ethic from which her mother, Marilyn, built her multi-million dollar beauty business from the ground up, Marlena has forged her own success in the same manner, i.e., from the bottom up.

Investing her teen years learning every aspect of her mother's company, Marlena began working on the sales floor, in customer service and assembly and shipping lines at Miglin's flagship salon on Chicago's tony Oak Street.

Leaving the company for several years, she secured a communications degree from Northwestern University and also took jobs in the non-profit sector as well as the apparel business.

Marlena then returned to Marilyn Miglin, L.P., where she spent a few years in each corporate division, learning the details of the company's operations. As Operations, then General Manager, then graduating to COO, she brought a new level of technical expertise, breathing fresh life into a business whose customer database still consisted of hand-written records. Assuming the reigns of the company's national wholesale division, she increased department store sales 30% while implementing innovative strategies to turn overstock losses into profitable ventures. She also introduced a new, untapped middle market to the company's high-end luxury goods.

More recently, she has actively courted international sales and spurred the development of e-commerce, leading the company into the global economy and firmly establishing a rapidly growing foothold in the Caribbean, Canadian and Middle Eastern markets.