Entrepreneurial Influences
Local business owners have found some interesting correlations between their backgrounds and their entrepreneurial tendencies.

By Ellen Jensen

Although becoming a business owner never crossed Judy Hohn’s mind when she was young, the seeds of entrepreneurship were planted early. Hohn, owner of Serenity Day Spa, grew up in a small farming community where if you wanted something done, you did it yourself. If you needed money, you grew a crop or raised an animal and then sold it.

“When I was in high school, a friend’s sister was engaged to be married,” Hohn said. “Her dad gave her a baby pig and told her to take care of it, feed it and grow it. The money they made from selling the pig would pay for the wedding. That made a huge impact on me.”

Kristi Nimmo, owner of Chocolate Legacy, experienced a similar upbringing. She grew up in rural Iowa, where she watched her family and neighbors take care of their businesses every day as a way of life; hedging their bets on crops, weather and animals.

“I learned about options and taking risks,” Nimmo said. “That was a normal part of life, along with the futures on the radio in the morning.”

Entrepreneurial Beginnings
Whether as a way of life or because of something in their genes, many small business owners showed their entrepreneurial leanings early in life. Such was the case for Joe Davis, owner of Custom Engineering. When he was six years old, Davis took his neighbor’s garbage cans to the curb each week. His fee for the service was 30 cents a week—the price of a bag of candy plus a penny tax.

“As I grew up, I always was trying to sell Match Box and Hot Wheel cars,” Davis said. “By the time I was in junior high, I knew I wanted to be a
businessman.”

Hohn earned her first money selling pecans from her grandparents’ trees. She said she was fascinated by the fact that, with a little work, you could turn into money something that just fell off the trees on your property.

Even as a child, Curt Cuscino, owner of House of Tears Design, used his creative talent to make money. He designed greeting cards and sold them to friends and family members. Later, he created fliers for his lawn-mowing business.

Nimmo’s early entrepreneurial endeavors came from necessity. As a child, she was heavily involved in 4-H, which offered opportunities to travel to conferences around the country. To pay for the trips, she participated in every fundraising event available, and even came up with a few of her own. She sold trash bags, candles and fruitcakes. She also held bake sales, raked yards and babysat.

“The kids around me could care less how many trash bags they sold,” Nimmo said. “For me, it was important that I did well, not as an ego boost, but because I needed the money to go on my adventures. It was rare if I wasn’t the top salesperson, or at least in the top three.”

Work Ethic
Although people rarely think about it during childhood, their upbringing plays a huge part in their career choices. Jeanette Prenger, owner of ECCO Select, said the work ethic her parents instilled in her and her five siblings greatly influenced where she is today.

“My parents were committed to all six of us going to college,” Prenger said. “It was very important to them that all of us had degrees. They felt that education would enable us to accomplish whatever we wanted to do.”

Prenger learned the benefit of utilizing resources from her mother, a former teacher in Portugal. When the family moved to Kansas City, her mother started managing rental properties. She didn’t have any formal business education, so she asked lots of questions and learned as she went.
Cuscino said he was raised to always do the best job he could and never cut corners.

“My dad would see sloppy work and make me do it again,” Cuscino said. “I quickly learned to do jobs right the first time, and that stuck with me and has translated to my own business.”

His company offers design solutions for a variety of media, including print pieces, Web sites, brand identity/logos and packaging.

School Days
Hohn earned bachelor’s degrees in business and economics from Avila University and an MBA from Rockhurst University. She said her business courses were a far cry from today’s courses, where entrepreneurship is a buzzword. Still, she said the MBA program changed her perspective on business and helped her look at issues from a higher level.

“I learned how to look at the whole more than the parts and think about how everything in a business fits together,” Hohn said.
Hohn’s most influential course, however, was a metaphysics course at Avila. She said the class looked at perception and reality and helped her realize that everybody’s perception of reality is different.

“When you own a business, you’re dealing with that all of the time,” Hohn said. “You, your employees and clients all see everything from a different perspective, so you have to figure out how to bring all of those together. A successful entrepreneur navigates through that and creates what each person is looking for.”

Children as Teachers
Being on the other side of the classroom can also be a learning experience. Benton Boyd, co-owner of Di Interactive, an interactive multimedia company, gained a lot of useful experience by teaching grade school. There’s nothing like a roomful of sixth graders to teach you how to communicate, Boyd said. His time in the classroom has been critical to how he and his partner—also a former sixth-grade teacher—run their business today.

“Working with 11 and 12-year-olds all day long for a couple of years gives you a different perspective on life,” Boyd said. “It’s this perspective that helps you deal with larger people in the real world.”

Lessons on treating people with respect, being fair, honest and forthright translate to business ownership and come through in every interaction with a client. Teaching also gave Boyd organizational and planning experience and provided a lesson in time management.

Learning from the Corporate World
Although corporate America can be stifling for some entrepreneurs, the experience has its benefits. Many small business owners cut their teeth in the corporate world, gaining knowledge about what to do and, in many cases, what not to do.

Boyd learned not to create so many boundaries that you snuff out passion, creativity and intensity.

“Personalities like mine often have a limited life span, or go in spurts, but ultimately will burn out,” Boyd said. “In the corporate environment, you are typically encouraged against getting too creative, and required to work within a finite set of boundaries.”

Although Boyd’s creativity was snuffed in the corporate environment, he picked up some good experience in marketing, strategic planning, project management, product development and implementation and sales. He was involved in numerous pieces of the business cycle and held positions where he had to understand how those pieces all worked together.

“Everything I did in the corporate world qualified me to do more than just be an honest, creative and passionate guy who is great with clients,” Boyd said. “It qualified me to offer solutions based on strategy and on proven, yet innovative, methods.”

Small businesses also provide a learning environment for future entrepreneurs. Nimmo learned from the poor decisions of other small business owners. Her first job out of college was working for a franchise owned by a husband and wife team. With a small company, you get to see the operations intimately, whether you like it or not, and Nimmo witnessed many decisions that seemed counter to what would be effective for the business and its employees.

“Even fresh out of college, I thought there had to be a better away of operating a business than what they were doing,” Nimmo said. That experience gave her a framework in which to start thinking about how she would handle such decisions in her own business.

“I took that experience with me,” Nimmo said. “There are still times when I fall back on the decisions they made and what I would have done differently.”
 
Cutting the Cord
There is no question that the corporate world can be a great training ground for entrepreneurs, pushing them past previously conceived limits. Sometimes, the experience is so good that it’s difficult to leave. For example, Nimmo’s last corporate position was in human resources with Aquila, where she was given responsibilities that made her think like a business owner. When Aquila acquired a company in Texas with 32 employees, Nimmo was charged with pairing the number of employees down to 16. She made her assessment, thinking somebody else would review her work and make suggestions. Her superiors told her they trusted her decisions and to go forward with severance packages.

“That gave me confidence that I could operate a business unit,” Nimmo said. She added, however, that if Aquila hadn’t shut down the whole division three and a half years ago, she would still be working there.

“Only because I was forced out of job did I stop and think about the opportunities of being self-employed,” Nimmo said. She said she loved her job and would not have elected to leave the security blanket of the corporate environment, even though the long hours, stress and bureaucracy were taking a toll on her.

For Prenger, cutting the cord was easier. When she joined the workforce, Prenger thought she would follow in her father’s footsteps, climbing the corporate ladder. She didn’t consider owning her own business until a coworker told her she could do a better job than the vendors her team was using.

“Sometimes we were simply getting bodies, not people with any experience,” Prenger said.

Her co-worker’s comment got the ball rolling. Prenger did some research, and after taking the Kauffman FastTrac course, she started ECCO Select, which offers supplemental staffing for consulting, contract and direct placement in the areas of information technology, finance and administration.
Cuscino used his time in the corporate world as a means to an end. During his last semesters of college, Cuscino was running House of Tears Design by himself on evenings and weekends. He then went to work for Sprint as a programmer, but even before taking the job, he knew it was temporary. He stayed at Sprint for about two years, landing his own contracts over lunch and working on them at night until he established a solid client base.

“There was a tug of war going on between my full-time duties at Sprint and my duties with House of Tears Design,” Cuscino said. “Once House of Tears Design was stable enough to support me, I let Sprint go.”

Roadmap to Entrepreneurship
Custom Engineering’s Davis also had a plan. He didn’t know what kind of business he wanted to own, but he knew he wanted to own one. His goal was to go to school and then work for a Fortune 500 company for about 10 years. Then he’d set off to do his own thing.

“I missed by about three years,” Davis said. “I was at 3M 13 years.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering, and later an MBA while working at 3M. When he was ready to go out on his own, Davis started looking around for a business to buy. He even interviewed some business owners to get their perspectives on owning and running a business.

His initiative paid off. Through those interviews and the power of networking, Davis stumbled onto Custom Engineering, a consulting engineering company that specializes in the design of mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems for commercial and industrial buildings.

One of the business owners he talked to knew someone who knew someone who was looking to sell the business, Davis said.

Some entrepreneurs have a plan, and others wind up business owners almost by accident. There are infinite paths to entrepreneurship, but it seems that a person’s background affects every one of them.

“From where I am today, it’s easy to look back now and see that everything I’ve done in my working life and education has led to this, like a road map,” Boyd said. “And it’s still going forward, and I’m always excited about that part of it.”

Ellen Jensen is the managing editor of Kansas City Small Business Monthly magazine.