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3 keys to being a successful entrepreneur

Entrepreneur Jo Malone’s business philosophy has three core tenets: passion, resilience, and creativity.

“You have to have a passion for your product, your business and your team. Don’t be frightened of hard times. Resilience is really important; it builds business muscle. And respect creativity. She walks right by the side of you. You don’t own it. But when she whispers in your ear, make sure you’re listening.”

Malone has experienced her fair share of setbacks while trying to build her business. Twenty-two years ago, when she was 35 years old, she was trying to sell enough pots of face cream to pay her rent. She started with a few plastic jugs, a saucepan and raw ingredients in her kitchen. Today, the eponymous line is a well-known beauty brand that was acquired by Estee Lauder (EL) in 1999.

Since the acquisition, Jo Malone London has become an integral part of the conglomerate’s luxury portfolio. The company even highlighted Jo Malone last quarter, citing the fragrance line’s strong double-digit gains as a bright spot.

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Though Malone left the brand in 2006 and has since founded a new fragrance collection, Jo Loves, she said she’s still proud to be associated with the namesake fragrance line—most of the time.

“I’m really proud of what I’ve built. The biggest cosmetic giant in the world bought me because they couldn’t create [what I did]—that’s a huge compliment. I don’t regret the sale, and I certainly don’t regret selling to Estee Lauder,” Malone told Yahoo Finance. “It was weird in the beginning, but I’m kind of used to it now. There’s moments and days where I feel that [the brand] is not me. And then there are moments where I read about a member of the team doing something amazing and I feel proud.”

It’s easy to gloss over the gritty, less-than-glamorous paths that entrepreneurs like herself had to take before reaching any semblance of success, but it doesn’t tell the full story of an individual’s journey. That’s why she chose to detail the various hurdles she’s had to overcome in her new autobiography, “My Story.”

“The book really goes in between the surface of success, and it takes you down into the cracks of what it’s really like to come back and build again.”

Having grown up in government housing in London and struggling with dyslexia all her life, Malone was told that she would never make anything of herself. But, now she credits her tough upbringing with giving her the fortitude to build two companies from the ground up.

“I didn’t know what an entrepreneur was at 11, but I knew that it was up to me to put food on the table and to make sure everything ran. And I think the moment when I learned how to make face creams, and I knew that if I made 100 pots of face cream they would sell and there would be money to pay the rent, that was the moment where I think the entrepreneur was probably born in me.”

Melody Hahm is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.