Hello, I'm Denise Roberts, owner of D.A. Roberts & Associates.

For 10 years I have been presenting a program called, Painless Prospecting, and my purpose is to help my clients meet and exceed their financial goals painlessly.

I created Painless Prospecting as therapy for me. Although I had been is sales for years I always hated prospecting for business. So one day I wrote down all the reasons prospecting hurt so much & what would I have to do to make the pain stop. I then shared it with all my friends in sales and they told me I was on to something, since no other sales training program had come up with a way to take the pain out of prospecting and encouraged me to share it with others.

When I first started, I needed money and talked my husband into letting me take some of the equity out of our house. Well some time had passed and no money was coming in and he suggested I go and get a real job. I asked him to hang in there with me and let me have another 6 months. By now I had cashed in my 401K from my previous job and started to run up my credit cards but I was determined. I promised him I wouldn't lose the house or our life savings and then my business started to turn the corner.

To start and to stay in business, stay focused. Put your mind to the one thing you want and you'll get it. I'm Denise Roberts.

This interview was taped at Detroit Public Television to air in conjunction with Small Business School's regular weekly broadcasts. These people have been recommended by the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) and the Michigan Small Business Association as people who are "respected by their industry and loved by their community." They are givers and doers. And, they are all trying to heal the heart of a broken city and make it a place where everybody is proud to say, "I live in Detroit!"

In doing this brief profile, each person is then considered for an entire half-hour show of Small Business School.

To develop their transcript, each of these people answered a series of questions (the same questions within the online school). To be part of these one-minute profiles, we believe that you should be a member of the station and at least one of the local business groups that are committed to building a new Detroit.

To learn more about the online school, click here.

To view the selection criteria, click here. To watch the video, you must have a high speed access to the Internet (cable or DSL minimum).