Jan 19 2010: National Airing of NaturaNectar on “The Art of Living” with Marilu Henner

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Click Here to Watch the 5 Minute Segment

GNC Live Well. Now With EaseFemin™

EaseFemin™ Menopausal Support Featured at GNC Live Well Website

Happy Memorial Day everyone!

In my last postings I have shared some exciting news about our company and product distribution expansion. Today I am proud of our team as we announce our new partnership with GNC – General Nutrition Corporation!  GNC is the largest retail chain of vitamins and supplements in the world with over 5,500 outlets in the USA alone.

Initially EaseFemin™ Menopausal Support will be featured at GNC Live Well website and will also be available at GNC concept stores. We will be working with them to increase our presence at GNC retail corporate stores.

This Partnership is a recognition by an industry leader such of the quality, innovation and differentiation that our product and future line bring to the natural products industry.

I want to thank our team, our network of supporters and especially the GNC team who has worked with us to implement this important Partnership.

This is another concrete step towards the fulfillment of our vision: we want to “be a leader in science-based natural healing and wellbeing, benefiting our customers and the world.” With GNC we are becoming closer to our customers and we are taking a great step to make our product known not only in the US but in many other countries where GNC operates.

Mary Jo, Our Queen Bee of Sales, likes to end her emails with the expression: “more to come”. I can’t think of a better way to end this blog!  Take care!

The Gift of the Bees for You and Me

Copyright © 2009 NaturaNectar™. All rights reserved.

Today I watched The Bee Movie with my kids and what a great family movie!  Humanizing bees as they perform their jobs in the hive and at the outside (our) world was a great idea. The moral of the movie, in my perspective, is no society fully accomplishes its purposes when motives are centered exclusively on the society itself. What a great lesson for us humans, especially in these days when so much is said about sustainability and being green and yet we are so self focused.

I am so excited that we have created NaturaNectar™ inspired by the one of the beehive’s precious produce, the Bee Propolis and by the intriguing way bees organize themselves in the hives to generate the elements necessary for their own existence and survival and, as a consequence, provide us, their human neighbors, with the gift of nutrition, immunity and great health.

During their life cycle that can vary from  4 to 6 weeks to 4 to 6 months depending on the work they perform, bees have a very busy and complex life. That’s probably why there is so much buzz about the bees! In the hive, under the leadership of the queen bee, all other bees have to perform different activities so that the elaborate and mostly sterile inner-hive can function and complete its life-cycle. Bees will work on different tasks involving, for instance, water, pollen, honey, royal jelly, honeycomb construction using wax, and propolis.

Our desire and ultimate aim is for our company to be just like that.  We will work diligently to generate the necessary resources for our own existence and just like the bees, we will strive to provide our clients with the gift of high quality supplements to improve their health.   To our neighbors in greater need and the environment necessary to sustain life, our goal is to be a beacon, by giving back and inspiring others to do so. Just as the bees have for tens and maybe hundreds of millions of years given so much to us, we believe it is now our time to follow the example of the bees and make a difference on our neighborhood.

As our business develops, we are having the pleasure to work with great people who can understand our culture and help us craft our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program. If your company has an inspirational and effective CSR policy in place, share what makes it so special with me and our blog readers.  Here is my promise:  I will listen, and maybe use it as a source of inspiration!

Thank you for following this blog and have a blessed weekend!

NaturaNectar™: Building Upon a Vision, One Step at a Time

Happy weekend everyone!  This has been a great week for NaturaNectar™!

When we start something from scratch as we did with this business, for long periods of time you keep working hard on different pieces of the puzzle. Product conception, development, manufacturing, marketing, sales and customer service are the most evident pieces, but there are many more areas involved. Deep inside you know they will somehow connect to each other latter on but the need for laser focus on each area as we build them, makes us sometimes wonder if they will ever make sense as a whole organism.

At those times we are blessed to have spent quality time during the genesis of the company to ensure relevant vision and mission statements as well as corporate values were carefully crafted. The vision became a simple but powerful statement: “NaturaNectar™ will be a leader in science-based natural healing and well-being, benefiting our customers and the world.” It gives us a code of conduct to last throughout our company’s existence, something we can always refer back to and be reassured when facing challenges:

1. We are sowing to be leaders: becoming leaders in any industry will never be an easy task especially in the vibrant natural products one
2. The harvest is gratifying:  improving lives of both our clients and neighbors (people we will touch along the way)

For me that’s a great combination of effort and satisfaction. Today we are already hearing back from our clients on how EaseFemin™ has provided relief for a challenging phase of their lives. It is one of the first fruits of the vision but it did not happen from day to night…

About a year ago, a friend from my church was listening to my description of NaturaNectar‘s business model and all the great things I had in my mind to do for the company. After some minutes of paying close attention, he interrupted me and said “you know Jose, these are great plans but I will give you one piece of advice: whatever you do, do it right the first time”. This simple word of common sense, made an impact on me. It confirmed the attitude already established in the company but also served as a milestone that we were and should continue to be in the right track.

Yesterday another good friend, Geraldo Matos – who has a passion for fitness – told me that he has just surpassed one of his personal bests: exercising on an aerobic stepper he did the equivalent to going up on a building of 474 floors in just 1 hour and 30 minutes. To be able to do that he took several right steps throughout his life including the discipline of dieting, daily exercise and intake of the right vitamins and nutrients. One step at a time, and what an accomplishment!

As we developed our first product, many times we were tempted with shortcuts, little compromises that would still give us a relatively good product at the end but not the best. I am glad we said NO to every single one of them. Instead, we kept moving up one step at a time going as fast as we could without tripping, keeping our eyes fixed on the vision.

In closing, I am back to “This has been a great week for NaturaNectar™!” You know why? No, we haven’t closed that multi-million dollar deal, at least not YET! However the doing things right the first time, give us today a sense that the future for NaturaNectar™ is very bright. I am loving to discuss the potential of our company with our business Partners and see the smile in their faces as together we get excited about it. I am enjoying every bit of it, one step at a time. Can’t wait to get to floor 474!

YOU AND ME: Is Your Dream Approved or Declined?

Credit Cards are fascinating pieces of plastic that have changed the way people pay for virtually anything over the last four decades.

One of the neatest stories about credit cards is how one gets an authorization from a card issuer at the point of sale in literally less than 5 seconds.  Think about it:  It normally takes longer for the store clerk to swipe your card and enter the amount of the transaction than for the transaction route to complete:

1.  transaction leaves the store

2.  goes to the acquiring institution (which is probably out of state)

3.  goes to a major processor (somewhere in the world)

4. travels then to a card network (American Express, Visa or MaterCard)

5. which finally delivers it to the card issuing financial institution for approval.

The card issuing bank then analyzes the transaction against a complex set of risk management and credit rules and responds to the original store with either the anticipated “authorized” or the embarrassing “declined”. Of course the transaction will have to travel all the way back through the same route, so that the little POS slip can be printed for one more happy consumer! So fast! So many times, actually tens of billions of transactions every month.

I have actually spent some of my career in Financial Services leading credit card networks and it amazes me that with the same kind of speed described above, I have made a change into a new and fascinating industry, the Natural Products one.  I will surely talk more about NaturaNectar™ in future blogs, but today let’s focus on the dream.

I have always dreamed abut doing something different, new, that would add significance to our “world neighborhood” and to my life.  Suddenly it was God’s time for me.  A difficult decision to leave the “sureness” of Corporate America and to embark into the adventures of entrepreneurship and I can tell you, it’s been quite a ride!

NaturaNectar™ was born from this dream, from the intersection of my mid-life sudden realization that I am playing the second half, already running behind schedule to build such a visionary project.

It’s being such a joy to see this project come to fruition basically from a meeting between a few ideas typed on my laptop in 2008 and my Partner’s decade long dream to do something very similar.  The good news is God somehow made us meet, and today some parts of the project are already history as NaturaNectar™ thrives.

I can’t say it enough that this is only the very beginning of a long journey, but I few blessed by God’s given courage to steer my life from its natural course to be where I am today.

When Alessandro and I discuss the daily issues we face the temptation is to focus on the limitations, the hurdles, the fact the we are still very small compared to our competitors and how difficult it will be to penetrate the market.  When this happens we are convicted and prompt to refocus, to move from the limitations of today to the possibilities of tomorrow and boy are we ready for the fight!? You bet!

Do you have a dream?  At the end of your life transaction are you going to get an “approved” or “declined” message?  Think about it!

YOU AND ME: Advice for Job Hunters

As my blog tag line says sometimes I will be blogging about Red Propolis, NaturaNectar™ my company, and sometimes about YOU and ME. The last is the focus of today’s.

A lot of my friends are struggling with the job market at a time when the funnel has never been so wide at the top.

About a year ago, I decided the route of entrepreneurship. I always had a desire to do something new, from the heart, that would make a difference in the world. I was blessed to find a way to realize my dream (www.naturanectar.com). That said I am just at the beginning of my journey and it was a coincidence that it has been taking place during a time that the market to search for jobs is very crowded…

From my experience, my advise to my friends searching for jobs right now, probably for many months, is to try take advantage of this time and do something for yourselves, your families and for your community. Do some volunteer work, enhance your skills by taking courses, get closer to God and try to keep your mind out of things you can’t control anyway (such as when the next interview will take place) and then, keep pressing on, doing the righ things as things will turn around. However remember that when the opportunity to be in front of an employer comes, all your competition will be striving to PERFORM their best interview, because that has been their sole focus. Here is my advice: BE YOURSELF, show your skills but show what kind of person you truly are, the stuff that no one else has: YOU. THAT MAY BE YOUR PLUS, when everyone else is trying to use their “learned interview techniques”. This will give you an unmatched level of confidence.

My very Best!