Not only does the following story shine a light onto one woman’s process of perseverance, passion and success, it allows us all to learn a bit more about how and why Best Money Moves developed, why there’s nothing else like it on the market and how Best Money Moves will help bring your own company greater success in 2018.
Ilyce Glink and her family. One son at Stanford and the other at Northwestern!
Happy Holidays!
I have found that the folks who read my newsletter really want to hear stories about how successful people achieved success and happiness. If you have been reading my newsletter over the years you will recall that I have profiled individuals who have great advice for job seekers and individuals whose success we can all learn from. This news letter is the later.
In our 2017 holiday newsletter I want to tell you about good friend of mine, Ilyce Glink, who started as a freelance journalist at the Chicago Tribune and is now the CEO of a successful software company. Or as Ilyce likes to say, “How to transition from freelance writer to software executive in three easy decades.”
If you ask Ilyce about the keys to success as an entrepreneur, she’ll tell you it’s imperative to be flexible and nimble. It also crucial to remain open to new and different opportunities; some people aren’t open to new ideas and they miss great opportunities. Finally, she’ll tell you it’s okay to not only think outside the box, but just toss it away altogether.
The secret to Ilyce’s success is that she never lets a successful business go until it has run its course. Today, her primary focus is her software company, Best Money Moves, but she is about to publish the Fourth edition of her best-selling book (available February, 2018), 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask. She still writes a nationally syndicated column and has nearly than one million copies of her books in print. She is also working on a project with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management to publish a private label book (her sixth).
Ilyce graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree English Literature and Rhetoric with minor in Music. In other words, she was unemployable. She spent 4 months working for a commercial property manager and got her real estate sales license. In the process, she learned a lot about real estate and the mistakes that buyers and sellers often make.
Her dream was to write for a living so she networked and pounded on doors until she was able to start doing freelance writing for the Chicago Tribune and as many small papers as she could find. From 1988 to 1998 she wrote for every department at the Tribune except Sports. She was also published in the Washington Post and became a contributing writer for Worth Magazine.
In 1998, she met a producer at WGN TV and started doing segments on personal finance and real estate for WGN TV and WSB radio in Atlanta, where she hosted her own top-rated Sunday morning talk show for 15 years. From 1994 to 2005, she published her first ten books. To this day she is on WGN radio 2 times a week. In 2001, her WGN news director handed her a packet of information about Money Smart Week at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which is how Liz and Ilyce first met!
Her media and speaking career continued to grow and in 1998, she was invited by a huge financial services company to create a lead generation program around education for home buyers and sellers. That led to many opportunities from Fortune 1000 companies to design digital and offline content programs designed to solve business problems while educating, nurturing, and engaging consumers. She created huge digital projects for Discover Card, Equifax and Humana, as well as corporate publishing projects for companies like Quill.
In 2012, Ilyce was asked to create financial wellness programs that were designed to sell things to consumers, who, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, felt they couldn’t afford to buy them. After designing three such programs, Ilyce decided to start Best Money Moves, a cloud-based, mobile-first financial wellness platform. And, as you can see, it’s the culmination of all that Ilyce has done and learned since 1988 about real estate, personal finance, consumer engagement, and publishing.
In the wake of the financial crisis, she believes employers are beginning to recognize that financial stress eats away at an employee’s ability to focus, engage, and be productive. Best Money Moves, launched in January 2016, is a low-cost way for employers to reduce financial stress, by giving the best information, tools, and resources, along with live Money Coaches, who are experts in debts, budgeting, credit issues, housing issues, student loans, and bankruptcy. The product is brandable and customizable to a surprising degree.
One of her flagship technologies is the Stressometer™. It measures financial stress in 15 categories, then uses machine learning to push relevant and personalized content to individual employees with tools they can act on. The pricing is inexpensive for employers and solves myriad problems with one product. Companies that utilize Best Money Moves report that 45% to 65% of employees are logging in, using the product, and getting help. Best Money Moves was a finalist for the Next Great HR Technology Company at the HR Tech Insiders Conference in 2017.
If you’d like to connect with Ilyce on LinkedIn you can do it here.
Ilyce’s website is: https://bestmoneymoves.com
Ultimate Resumes‘ mission is to write resumes that position our clients to obtain the jobs of their dreams. A great resume has to represent you when you aren’t there to do it yourself so it needs to be written masterfully in order to present you and your accomplishments in a way that resonates with recruiters and hiring managers. Ultimate Resumes is not the least expensive resume writing service you can hire but it is the best.
Liz Handlin, CEO, Ultimate Resumes LLC