Put on Your Crown (6 page)

There is beauty in every kind of woman, but when people focus on trying to capture one specific look, they miss out on all
this variety. They also lose sight of the value of character. But first we have to see it and appreciate it in ourselves.

My mother had a great exercise she used to teach the kids in her class at Irvington High School to help them love themselves
a little more. Mom would see a lot of very troubled teenagers. So many of these kids were from broken homes. A number of them
were abused, sexually and physically. Often these kids would act out, and their grades would suffer. Even though she had forty
kids in her class, she made a point of remembering each and every one of them by name in the
first week. She also made a point
of remembering a little detail about each of the kids so they’d know they were being seen and acknowledged. Often it was the
first time they felt noticed in school.

She made them write lists of all the things they liked about themselves, and it would usually stump them. Some kids turned
over their papers and started to cry. Ms. O would have to get them started. “Come on, now,” she’d say. “You’ve got a pretty
smile, write that down!” Or, “You take care of your brothers and sisters.” Or, “You have a great sense of style, you always
wear fly clothes.”

This one seventeen-year-old girl was so tired and angry because she had to get up every morning to feed her younger siblings
breakfast and get them ready for school while her mom was still in bed, too strung out on crack to move. This poor girl couldn’t
think of anything nice to say about herself, because she’d turned all that bitterness and anger from her unhappy home life
in on herself. Eventually, after some coaxing from my mother, she wrote down the only good thing she could think of: “I believe
that God loves me and He is going to make things better.”

Ms. O would tell these kids to tape their lists to the bathroom mirror. They had to read their lists, those few words of self-love,
while they brushed their teeth, to remind themselves how special they
were, no matter how rough the day got. And as the school
year progressed, those boys and girls walked taller, got better grades, and graduated. Several even went off to college. All
because my mother loved them enough to teach them to love themselves.

Speaking of Ms. O, I just remembered another life-stopping moment. It had a bigger impact on my self-esteem than any glamorous
photo shoot ever could.

It was my twenty-fourth birthday, and I decided to celebrate by inviting my closest friends to party on a yacht in Marina
del Rey. This was around the time I was doing
Living Single
. Something started happening to my face. Up until then, I looked like my dad. Everyone who met him and me together would
say, “Wow, you look just like your father,” and I didn’t mind. I was proud of my dad. He’s a handsome guy. But as I was getting
dressed for the party, I stepped out onto the balcony to look at the sunset, turned to go back inside, and suddenly caught
myself in the mirror. I saw my mother staring back at me.

There was something about the elegant dress I wore that day and the way I was standing at that moment that made me really
feel like a woman. I thought, “Wow, look at you!” My mother’s beauty was right there, in my reflection. I had her cheekbones,
her eyes, her smile. This is the moment we
can look forward to as young women growing up and wondering to ourselves, “Am I
beautiful?” It’s the sudden recognition that, yes, we are.

Unlike her students, I didn’t need Mom’s bathroom mirror checklist because I could see her face in mine, and that was enough
to remind me of all the things I love about myself even beyond my mother’s gorgeous face. I saw all the kindness, compassion,
and wisdom she had nurtured in me. I saw my soul.

Seeing myself in that moment was the first time I truly felt comfortable in my own skin. I felt like a lady, and that was
a good thing.

People first, then money, then things.

—S
UZE
O
RMAN

I
could tell something was wrong the second I heard my bookkeeper’s voice on the phone. He was an accounting student I’d put
in charge of paying all my bills, and somehow, over the last few months, he’d gotten overwhelmed. Using the signature card
I gave him, he wrote check after check after check to pay off every bill that came into the office, not even questioning the
amounts. Then, just as he was getting ready to pay off another pile of invoices coming due, he noticed something was off.

“Uh, Dana, there’s something I have to tell you.” It sounded like his stomach was about to fall out of his mouth. “I, uh…
Okay, I’m just gonna say it. There’s no money left in your account.”

“Stop playing! That ain’t funny.”

“No, really. It’s gone. Boss, I’m so sorry….”

“Whaaaat?! Are you kidding me? How can that be? What do you mean it’s all gone?”

I couldn’t believe it. It was the spring of 2000, and I’d been working my butt off down in Los Angeles, doing my talk show
and a heap of other projects. I was making plenty of money. This just didn’t make sense. Then, seconds after I got off the
phone with my bookkeeper, my accountant called.

“Dana, this is bad. There’s nothing left in your account, and you owe the IRS one million dollars. Those taxes are due next
week!”

I thought I was going to die. I literally was going to lose it. It wasn’t the worst life-stopping moment of my life, but it
was up there in the top five. I felt nauseated. I couldn’t breathe. There wasn’t a nickel in my account to pay the IRS, and
they don’t play. It was a scary situation to be in. I’d been working so hard, and for what? Just like that, I was broke. How
was it possible? Who let this happen?

I was mad at everybody. But mostly I was angry at myself. I should have known better. I should have paid more attention to
my finances. I should have handled my business and not left everything on the shoulders of some poor kid who was totally out
of his depth. It was my fault.

This is the first time I’ve talked publicly about going broke. I’m sharing this with you so you’ll understand how easy it
can be to lose it all at any level of wealth when you’re not looking hard enough.

We thought we made all the right moves. Shakim and I had decided a year before to set up our own record company. Both of us
could have had a deal with a major label and taken high-level, lucrative jobs as music executives. It would have been easier
in a lot of ways. You get expense accounts and travel accounts. You start buying things like flashy cars and houses, and before
you know it, you’ve acquired so much stuff and gotten so used to having everything paid for that you become dependent on that
label for everything. You become its slave.

We never wanted to be like that. Shakim and I are the kind of people who want to be free to think out of the box and not have
to go through some committee to do it. We’d been managing several successful artists for years through Flavor Unit Management,
and we already had a small distribution deal with a record label, but we wanted to take it to the next level. We wanted to
be like Jay-Z and Damon Dash at Roc-A-Fella or Baby and Slim at Cash Money Records. We wanted ownership. These guys proved
that you could create a high level of success when you own the content of the things you create, whether it’s music, movies,
or merchandising.

We’d heard the horror stories about what can happen when an artist doesn’t read before signing on the dotted line and someone
else ends up owning all your publishing and gets all the royalty checks. We didn’t want to do all the up-front work and sign
our lives away to lawyers and accountants who were making all the real money behind the scenes. We wanted to build our own
business and create an independent record label with all these amazing artists we’d found. The numbers didn’t lie. You have
to pay a small fee to get the record printed up and sent to the stores, but after expenses you can make as much as $10 a record.
With minimal success, you can reap lots of benefits.

But we didn’t factor in the tremendous overhead and start-up costs. Getting your own business off the ground can be like throwing
money into a vast pit. It never ends. And Shakim and I didn’t help ourselves. We had way too many employees on our payroll,
more than ten, and very few of them were generating enough income to justify their salaries. We were both guilty of being
too soft on our employees. We had friends and family members working for us—people we liked and felt deserved a shot—and we
wanted to
be loyal to them. It was hard for us to separate our emotions from our business.

We threw hundreds of thousands of dollars into our new label. We spent $60,000 to host the Hot 97 Summer Jam and generate
some buzz about our artists. We spent thousands more on radio promotion, tours, merchandising, vans, you name it. Instead
of buying studio time, which was getting expensive, we decided to buy our own forty-eight-track recording studio. We took
over Whitney Houston’s old space and called it Millennium Recordings. We redid the whole place. In addition to the main recording
studio, it had nice lounges, two pre-production rooms, and a rehearsal space to prepare for touring.

I’m not saying it was a bad investment, but now we were paying for our offices, the studio, way too many employees (including
their salaries and benefits), and artists’ expenses. And boy, let me tell you, artists can be like thankless children. They
are expensive to keep happy, and they have no appreciation or idea of what is being done for them, all before they’ve even
dropped an album. As much as we believed in their talents, they had yet to generate a cent for our label.

Meanwhile, my personal expenses were running high. I had my mom and dad and everyone else I’m looking out for. It was bad
for Shakim, too. He put his own skin in the game, even though he had a wife and two kids to support. We were working on finding
investors to raise some cash and help us cover our costs until we could generate revenue, but everyone who took to our idea
somehow never got around to paying us the money for it. Still, Shakim and I continued to cover the costs, because we believed
we’d raise the cash eventually.

Somehow in the confusion and our zealousness to reach our goal, we weren’t thinking clearly and we had overextended ourselves
almost to the point of bankruptcy. They were honest mistakes. No one was doing anything wrong. But in a short space of time,
my bookkeeper had signed some $500,000 worth of checks out of my account, and I wasn’t keeping tabs on any of this.

Then, bam! That phone call. By the time I scraped myself up off the floor, phone still in hand, I knew I had some serious
housecleaning to do. I called my mother, and she calmed me down, like she always
does. Then I called my accountant, who helped
me come up with a plan to pay back the IRS in a way that could be maintained. What happened wasn’t his fault, either, because
lots of bills weren’t going directly to his office. But we had to work out a new system.

Around that time, I remember watching an episode of
Oprah
, where she talked about how you should never let anyone else sign your checks. I thought, “Damn, Oprah, why are you telling
me this now?” I closed my account and opened a new one with a zero balance, and now I sign everything.
Everything!
No check is too small. No matter where I am in the world, my accountant prepares the checks, then sends them to me to sign.
It’s well worth the extra time and effort, because I catch errors no one else would. The other day, I saw a check my offices
had cut that was overpaying by more than $20,000. If I’d allowed it to go through uncorrected, that money would be gone forever.
It’s not like the vendor would be in any hurry to pay back the difference. As if! With a little extra diligence, I’m saving
myself thousands of dollars every year.

That wasn’t the only change we made. Shakim and I had to take a hard look in the mirror, and at each other, and figure out
what our priorities were and where we were going wrong. He told me that running the record label and the management company
was too much. He was overwhelmed. He needed a life! We had to choose which side of Flavor Unit would be our focus. We decided
to drop all but a couple of the artists we were managing. We were consumed with guilt about this. But guess what? Those artists
found new management, and they’re thriving today.

It was the same with our employees. I scaled back on my bookkeeper’s responsibilities so he could focus on getting his accounting
degree at college. We also had to let a couple of people go, and I had a few hard conversations with those who weren’t working
efficiently enough to justify what we were paying them.

I felt horrible about this. Shakim and I were making emotional decisions about our business and keeping people around out
of a sense of loyalty. But we weren’t doing ourselves any favors, and we weren’t helping our employees to grow, either. Instead,
we were creating a bunch of dependents. I’m proud to say that everyone we let go ended up doing just fine on their own. When
they realized they weren’t going to get that check anymore, they simply figured out their next move, hustled, and found themselves
a much better fit. We should have done it a long time ago. All those salaries we were floating could have paid for my nieces’
college fees and then some.