This Won't Be Pretty: First-Year Lessons for the Female Entrepreneur

Women entrepreneurs are often portrayed as aggressive, high-heeled alphas, out to disrupt the status quo or dominate the board room. Some are. Many are not.

This is a book for the latter. With a background in education and creative writing, Cassandra D'Alessio never intended to be a business owner. But after feeling unfulfilled in her career, she started and grew a successful marketing business without any real guidebook or role model. In This Won't Be Pretty, she now shares the lessons from her first year as an entrepreneur, including real-world tactics for businesswomen of all industries, backgrounds and personality types.

In This Won't Be Pretty, you'll learn:

• How to build an authentic brand that consistently represents your business
• How to find the right clients who you're best positioned to serve
• How to fire the wrong clients in order to grow your business
• How to adapt to the always-changing environment of entrepreneurship
• How to overcome failure and learn valuable lessons from it

From side-hustling accountants to app-designing engineers, female entrepreneurship is for all. Part memoir, part business strategy, This Won't Be Pretty is a real look at the chaos, humor and sometimes difficult lessons of your first year in business and how that first year can alter your life forever - in the best way possible.

Cassandra D'Alessio is the founder of Next Page Brand Strategies, Inc., a marketing agency dedicated to helping businesses tell authentic stories that build brand loyalty and drive customers to action. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Miami University (Ohio) and her M.A. in English Literature from the University of Louisville. Since 2007, she has held a variety of marketing leadership roles as well as a visiting lecturer position at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. This Won't Be Pretty is Cassandra's first book.