Nouveau Connoisseurs Corporation

Beaverton, OR, February 20, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Monique Hayward’s debut book, Divas Doing Business: What the Guidebooks Don’t Tell You About Being a Woman Entrepreneur (ISBN 978-0-615-26873-6), arms women with the tools and firepower to tackle the unique situations that will test their resolve, strength, and spirit as they start and manage their businesses. This book goes beyond the conventional entrepreneurial wisdom to “fill the spaces in between” business start-up guidebooks’ pages with solid advice illustrated through Hayward’s real-life stories and personal insight and interviews with a powerful, diverse lineup of nine successful women entrepreneurs.

Hayward, 38, is the founder of Nouveau Connoisseurs Corp., which owns and operates the award-winning Dessert Noir Café & Bar in Beaverton, Ore. She knows better than most that women entrepreneurs require timely and relevant firsthand information about business ownership. “Women who are considering starting a business need candor and honesty about circumstances that will make their entrepreneurial journey longer and harder than that of their male counterparts,” says Hayward. “Many benefits and rewards await the risk taker with the vision and courage to start a business, but my contributors and I are here to teach aspiring entrepreneurs how to steer clear of the potential pitfalls that they don’t even know to anticipate.”

With a foreword by Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman, a lifelong supporter of entrepreneurial women, Divas Doing Business features Hayward’s thoughts, experience, and insight about the topics in each chapter, which are supplemented with real-world examples and relevant research and statistics. For example, she offers tips and strategies for raising money without sounding (or feeling) like a little girl asking daddy for an allowance and how to stick to business when the potential funder has a different idea of “fringe benefits.” She also shares a unique perspective on work-life balance, instructing readers to define it on their own terms, accounting for what she offers as the “M Factors” – money, marriage and/or motherhood, mortgage, Mercedes (or your “motor vehicle”), and (peace of) mind.

Each chapter ends with a “Divas Lesson” that serves as the primary takeaway for readers, followed by a profile and subject-specific Q&A with a well-known woman entrepreneur. The contributors to Divas Doing Business represent a broad range of industries and share with readers their hard-won tribal knowledge about what it takes to see their businesses thrive and succeed. The contributors, in order of appearance, are:

· Pegine Echevarria, a nationally-recognized professional success coach, motivational speaker, author, and first Latina inducted into the Motivational Speakers Hall of Fame who is based in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fl.

· Lisa Price, founder of Carol’s Daughter, a beauty and skin care company based in New York City

· Margaret Wallace, co-founder of Rebel Monkey, a casual video game company based in New York City

· Denise Brosseau, co-founder of Invent Your Future Enterprises, a professional development firm in Silicon Valley, and co-founder and former CEO of the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs, a leading organization for women-led startups

· Sondra Bernstein, founder of the girl & the fig restaurant in Sonoma, Calif.

· Sheril Cohen Kunz, founder of Girl on the Go!, an upstate New York company that specializes in private in-home wig consultations for cancer survivors

· Crystal McCrary Anthony, author, TV personality, and movie producer who lives in New York City

· Valerie Red-Horse, media and entertainment celebrity and entrepreneur who founded Red-Horse Native Productions and Wall Street’s first Native American investment bank and lives in Tarzana, Calif.

· Jacqueline Rhinehart, former Universal/Motown Records executive and founder of New Jersey-based Organic Soul Marketing

Divas Doing Business sells for $19.95 and is available for purchase from Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com) as a trade paperback or as a download for the Kindle wireless e-book reader. It is also available for download as an ebook in Adobe PDF format from Hayward’s web site at http://moniquehayward.com. Hayward will donate a portion of the book’s sales proceeds to PLAN!T NOW, Freeman’s charity that provides assistance, research, and educational programs for individuals, businesses, and communities at risk for hurricanes and coastal storms. For more information about Divas Doing Business and the author, please visit http://moniquehayward.com. For more information about PLAN!T NOW, please visit www.planitnow.org.

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