This is part of a series called "One Entrepreneur's Journey," where I'm talking with solo entrepreneurs about their successes (and failures) along the path of entrepreneurship.

In this interview, I spoke with Traci Bisson, president and senior publicist of Bisson Barcelona, a public relations and social marketing firm that handles image management for authors and entrepreneurs.  Traci is also the founder of The Mom Entrepreneur, a resource for women who are balancing motherhood with running a company.

Tell me a little about your business and how you got your start as an entrepreneur.

I have Bisson Barcelona, which is a marketing and PR firm, and then The Mom Entrepreneur.  Bisson Barcelona I started in August of 2000.  The Mom Entrepreneur was started in April 2008.  With Bisson Barcelona, our primary niche there is, we work with authors.  We work in the literary industry, representing their images to the media.  That company was started because I was working for actually a series of companies that went out of business.  The first one I was with for five years, and eight weeks after I returned from maternity leave, they went out of business, and I was really left wondering, "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?"  I never wanted to be an entrepreneur.  It never even crossed my mind, because I was very used to working for the man, as they say, and was quite comfortable with it, felt very secure, and then everything fell apart.  I decided to do some freelance work.  I decided I needed to get more experience.  I went back into the workforce on a temporary assignment with a corporation, and they laid off the department I was working with, so then I went to another company.  About five months into it, I started noticing some of the same signs of problems in the company, so I decided to jump ship, and that was actually eleven days before 9/11.  Three months after I jumped ship, they went out of business, and basically, at that point, after those experiences, I said, "There's no security working for other people," and I really felt that I needed to make a go of it on my own.

Kind of where The Mom Entrepreneur comes into that is, as I started Bisson Barcelona, I was a mom and an entrepreneur, so I was reaching out, looking for organizations and other entrepreneurs who were experiencing the same struggles balancing motherhood and running a company.  I found great resources for women in business, but nothing for moms in business, so The Mom Entrepreneur really grew from there.

What's your role within The Mom Entrepreneur at this point?

I would describe it at the moment as an online resource for women balancing motherhood and running a company, and under that umbrella is the online support group, the educational tele-seminar series, a series of blogs that we run, and a co-op shop that we've put together.  Pretty much the whole premise of the organization has been to offer products and services that we find are needed by the members of our support group.  It started out as a blog, and it grew into an actual website, but now it really is becoming an organization with companies underneath it that are working to create more products and services to help mom entrepreneurs.

How are you managing to juggle your roles between The Mom Entrepreneur and Bisson Barcelona?

My passion has really been The Mom Entrepreneur for a year and a half now, and my goal has been to try to transition out of Bisson Barcelona to The Mom Entrepreneur.  The goal is to take Bisson Barcelona to an all online business.  I've found that a lot of the success for The Mom Entrepreneur has come by harnessing technology and really taking advantage of what's available.  Social networking is such a big thing.  There are so many mom entrepreneurs that are online, so now I'll go back to Bisson Barcelona and develop an online support group, if you will, for the niche audience that we work with, which is authors.

Let's talk about strengths and weaknesses.  What are some things that you have right as an entrepreneur, and what are things that you struggle with?

Well, at this stage, I've always felt that my strength has been my creativity.  I've been able to come up with the newest, latest, and greatest ideas, in my mind, and do something to implement them, but I've always found that my weakness has been prioritizing them, so I'll come up with a great idea, but then there's all these other great ideas and members throwing great ideas at me left and right.  It's sitting down and saying, "Okay, out of all these great things, what is going to benefit everybody the most," and I find I try to spread myself too thin and try to implement several of them at the same time, but I found, when I did that, it didn't work.

Entrepreneurs, they're out there, they're thinking, they have creative juices flowing, and they want to start all these companies.  I find, as a mom entrepreneur, what keeps me in check is my family.  I can only work so much and can only do so much, because obviously, I'm a mom first.

What do you wish you would have known before getting started as an entrepreneur?

Probably the biggest one is understanding how to scale a business.  We were in the literary industry, and we did not have a lot of competition, and we were kind of on the boom of everybody wanting to be an author.  That was around the same time that all the vanity presses came out, so everybody could be an author.  We had a rush of clients, and because of that, I threw bodies, I threw employees at the problem.  Unfortunately, I hired unskilled people, and I needed to be more conscientious about the help that I brought in and also about the market.  We were basically saying yes to any author who wanted to work with us, as opposed to looking closely at our ability to position them in the media and their expertise and their brand.  We took on anybody and everybody.  Obviously now, with The Mom Entrepreneur, I'm very focused.  It's a very specific niche, and had I known that when Bisson Barcelona was growing, the results would have been very different.

What is your best advice for new entrepreneurs?

Stay the course.  You can go down that path, you can get discouraged, you can empty your investment account and have your credit cards charged to the max, and think that you're never going to see the light of day again.  It's really a faith in yourself and a belief that you can do this.  If you don't have that, don't become an entrepreneur, because it is extremely challenging.  You will be tested to the limit.  You really have to stay the course.  Don't let the bumps in the road deter you.