How to Make Your Mark

The producer cues the applause. Franks takes a deep breath and steps into the spotlight. Actually, Franks has spent much of her life in the spotlight -- but as a star maker, not as a star herself. At age 21, when she grew bored of writing articles for fashion magazines, she founded a PR company that would later become legendary. Lynne Franks PR was the agency of choice for the trendiest fashion and entertainment personalities. The company helped launch Tommy Hilfiger, the Spice Girls, and Swatch in the UK, and Franks was the brains behind London Fashion Week. She became famous for the raucous parties that she threw, where all of the glitterati were guaranteed to show. Meanwhile, she allowed the business to push her into a cycle of 20-hour days and endless partying. Her trendy, high-stress life became the inspiration for a British cult-television show called Absolutely Fabulous! -- a satire that strayed significantly from the facts of Franks's life, though it captured her frenetic pace.

In 1991, burned out by her high-profile, punishing lifestyle, as well as by the struggle of raising two children and rescuing a disintegrating marriage, Franks stepped back. From the outside, she appeared to have everything: wealth, fame, power, a thriving business. But she felt hollow. Where was the meaning in her work? What was she passionate about? How could she make time for the things that mattered? "There was a point when I realized that I had everything I had always wanted," Franks explains. "I had a big house, money in the bank, a huge company, and a wonderful family. But I would just run from meeting to meeting, to events, to lunch, to more meetings. I'd forgotten what it was like to be a human being because I was too busy being a human doing."

So Franks sold her business and spent five years on a spiritual journey around the world. During that time, she organized What Women Want, a musical and cultural festival featuring Sinéad O'Connor and Chrissie Hynde; fronted a women's radio station in the UK; and went on a spiritual trek that included Native American sweat lodges in Washington State, a holy mountain in India, and sacred Celtic sites in Ireland. She also did publicity for nonprofit events and met with women entrepreneurs. After five years of traveling and chronicling her voyage in her autobiography, Absolutely Now! (Overlook Press, 1998), Franks felt that she had finally found her calling -- the way that she was intended to make her mark.

Franks's idea began to germinate when she moved to southern California in 1998 and started to work on a manifesto. The statistics that she uncovered during her research bolstered her belief that she was onto something big: There were 9.1 million women-owned businesses in the United States alone, growing at a rate of 6% per year for the past 8 years. And she learned that women-owned businesses employed 35% more people in the United States than all of the Fortune 500 companies employed worldwide.

Her book, which has sold more than 50,000 copies in the United States and the UK alone and which has been printed so far in three languages, is a wide-ranging guide to running a business and living healthily. Advice about financial statements is shuffled in with sample meditations and exercises to relieve back strain. Franks discusses gearing up emotionally and building a network. Laced among the pages of full-color illustrations are workbook exercises prodding readers to list activities that "light up" their souls or ways that they can make their enterprises more environmentally sound. Ultimately, the book reflects Franks's omnivorous embrace of several major trends: the boom in women-owned businesses, the mounting interest in creating companies that shoulder social (as well as shareholder) responsibilities, the increasing importance of "feminine" skills in the workplace, and the search for a healthy integration of life and work.

Franks's prediction of where those trends will lead is truly visionary. She imagines a global network of women entrepreneurs who are actively pursuing their dreams, mentoring other women, and changing the role of business in communities all over the world. She imagines business expertise and encouragement being available to women of all income levels. She sees a consulting practice that helps companies stop losing high-performing women to entrepreneurship by making their environments more women-friendly. She sees a SEED music label for female artists -- an inspirational soundtrack for women-owned businesses. She imagines a flourishing for-profit business that will allow her to channel her energy -- and that of her SEED network -- into helping women in poor nations become entrepreneurs.

"This is not about me," Franks says. "It's about delivering a message to women and men about the positive ways in which we can change our lives by working with our communities. All these years, I've been selling products. Maybe it's time to sell the idea that we can make a difference."