Stay-at-Home Moms as Entrepreneurs

StartupJournal looks at the growing trend of young mothers combining a stay-at-home lifestyle with entrepreneurial endeavors.
“For many women who leave the work force to care for children, motherhood is making invention a necessity. The daily routine of child-care presents such a minefield of little problems that they turn to tinkering, and then market their brainstorms.”
I am seeing this path in more and more of the self-assessments that my students are writing about in my classes. Many are saying that entrepreneurship gives them the freedom to be at home while still pursuing their business aspirations. It will be interesting to see how well these mothers can balance parenting both a new business and young children at the same time.
Anita over at Small Business Trends had more to say about this last week when this article was at the Wall Street Journal’s main site. Check out her post and the comments it produced.

Non-Profits as Entrepreneurial Ventures

Universities across the country, as told in this story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, are beginning to train non-profit managers in business skills, particularly entrepreneurial management skills.
“Around the country, business schools are creating and expanding programs that help nonprofit managers…apply bottom-line business skills to mission-driven projects. Courses in nonprofit management and related fields like social entrepreneurship are booming.”
There are several trends behind the growth in these programs.
“Several factors account for the surge of interest from students. First, turned off by stories of corporate greed, students are eager to find ways to make a contribution to a post-9/11 world. Second, with 1.4 million nonprofit organizations in the United States competing for government and philanthropic funds, charities need skilled fund raisers and administrators. In addition, their leaders are worried that scandals like those at United Way and other charities have shaken public confidence. They want to reaffirm it.”
I am seeing growing interest in our programs here at Belmont among both MBA students and undergraduate business students. Many of these students are also strong advocates that the private sector is the best answer to many of society’s problems, rather than relying on government programs.

Top 10 Entrepreneurs of All Time

MSNBC offers its list of the “History’s 10 Greatest Entrepreneurs”. Its list:
1. King Croesus
2. Pope Sixtus IV
3. Benjamin Franklin
4. P.T. Barnum
5. Thomas Edison
6. Henry Ford
7. Benjamin Siegel
8. Ray Kroc
9. H. Ross Perot
10. Jobs & Wozniak
This list includes a few good choices, but several of their picks were included because they were really good con-men, sleazy businessmen, or even gangsters. YIKES! What were they thinking?! Let’s try a list of those who build wealth and did good deeds for society as they made their wealth.
What are your picks??
(Thanks to Erin Anderson for passing this along).

Entrepreneur Gets Out the Vote with his Employees

One entrepreneur is being a civic leader by encouraging his employees to register to vote. As reported by NFIB:
“Charlie Birney…general partner of Atlantic Golf, an Annapolis, Md.-based owner, developer and manager of three golf courses, started his own get-out-the-vote effort at work. Aptly named Drive the Vote (www.drivethevote.com), Birney’s GOTV effort, in conjunction with the Maryland Golf Course Owners Association, emphasizes voter registration, voter participation and voter awareness.”
Birney goes all out to make sure that his employees have the information they need to make an informed decision.
“(H)e has compiled information on the candidates running, personalized it for each employee and delivered it by hand. Each personalized manila folder lists the employees’ representatives in the Maryland General Assembly and their voting records, one from NFIB and the other from Maryland Business for Responsive Government.”
He encourages voting by creating a raffle that awards one paid vacation day off to one lucky employee who votes on or before election day.
Why does Birney go through all of this effort?
“‘I really think it’s every citizen’s privilege, right and responsibility to vote.'”
Well said!

Young Entrepreneurs Find Success

Entrepreneur magazine presents their annual Young Millionaires feature. What is particularly inspiring is how these young people worked to build businesses with value with a variety of products and services including manufacturing makeup and body creams, a specialty medical school, furniture retailing, comic books, wine shops, retail clothing, and a large number of profitable on-line or web related businesses.

Second Generation not as Successful in Family Businesses

This study from Wharton reports on the challenge of intergenerational succession in family businesses.
“Despite the lack of independent directors on their boards and voting power for minority shareholders, family-run companies are still the better bet for all stakeholders as long as the founder of the firm is involved as chief executive officer or chairman. If the descendent of a founder runs the company, value is lost.”
Other studies show that third generation transfers are even more tenuous.

Inspiring Entrepreneurial Stories

One of the more inspirational student entrepreneurs I have worked with in recent years was a woman (due to confidentiality I cannot use her name) who had come back to school to support a very personal cause.
One of her children was hearing impaired. In her own research into the possible causes and treatments for hearing impairment in young children, she learned that in many situations the outcome for the child could be significantly improved with very early screening, preferable while they were still infants. And while in many larger hospitals such screening was routine, smaller community hospitals rarely screened for hearing loss in infants.
She took it upon herself to use her previous medical training to begin a service of going to regional hospitals throughout the upper mid-west to offer hearing screening for infants. About the same time, she also decided to finish her bachelor degree. That is where we met.
She enrolled in one of my entrepreneurship courses to learn how to manage this small business. Her original model was one of making sure the fees she charged were enough to cover her basic costs. She had no real intent of even drawing a salary for herself, as her husband was a successful contractor. She just wanted to do good work for others.
The class she was in was a special section I set up for students who had actual businesses up and running. The other students began to challenge her on her assumption that she would never personally be able to make a salary from this venture. We all worked with her on her pricing models, on the efficiency of her routes, how to fill up trips with more hospitals, and how to leverage a part-time clerical employee to increase her billable hours.
Her business is now providing infant hearing screening throughout the upper mid-west, and while still making the services affordable to maximize the families she serves, she is also drawing a reasonable salary for her time and expertise.
I love to see entrepreneurs do well while doing good work. Inc.com’s blog site has a similar story about a woman who actually made it to their Inc 500 list making and selling prosthetists. Read more about her story here.