The Bold, the Brave, and the Daring

Meet five entrepreneurs who’ve had the courage to strike out alone and hit the big time. Their inspirational stories stand out as shining examples of what great ideas and the passion to pursue them to wherever they lead can achieve.

Leslie O'Connorr
Founder and CEO of Search Wizards

Crossing the border from Canada to the United States in 1999, Leslie O’Connor brought with her $1,800, her son, and their dog and proceeded to build a multi-million dollar recruitment business called Search Wizards.

Working as a recruiter for an Atlanta-based tech staffing organization, O’Connor was putting in 14 hours a day. She felt there had to be a better way of living, and created a company that in 2007, had $12.2 million in sales. Last year, Search Wizards was ranked 89th on the Inc. Magazine 500 list of fastest growing private companies. There has also been acclaim from Catalyst Magazine and WomenEntrepreneur.com website, who have rated her one of the country’s top entrepreneurs.

Street smart

O’Connor was encouraged by her father to start a business career. He reckoned his street smart daughter would do better selling than going to college after high school. For 20 years, she worked selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Not surprisingly, this made her an excellent saleswoman and thickened her skin, enabling her to bounce back from the inevitable frustrations and disappointments in business.

She created Search Wizards in 2000, which allowed her the flexibility she craved that comes with working from home. Success has come quickly. In 2003 sales were $359,600. In 2007 revenue had soared to $12.2 million. Although the company has grown quickly, O’Connor has been mindful to grow organically, telling one interviewer, “I never bit off more tha
I could chew. I never wanted to have cash flow troubles. We’re debt free—always have been—which matters in this market.” As Search Wizards started to make money, all the cash was ploughed back into the business. She never had to borrow money or come up with a business plan to sell to potential investors.

Virtual company

Instrumental in her success has been the fact that the company is a virtual business. Starting with just a handful of consultants, there are now 135 working in five different countries. This has kept her overhead low, which she believes has enabled her to offer better service to clients. The team of recruiting and sourcing consultants provides expertise in core recruiting functions and aims to give their clients access to the best talent available.

Great juggler

O’Connor is keen to offer advice to other entrepreneurs and believes that one of her most valuable assets is the ability to multi-task. She told an interviewer from Entrepreneur Magazine, “Be a great juggler. As a woman in business, you will always have lots of balls in the air, including running your business and making strategic decisions to grow your business. In many cases you also have the role of being a wife, a mother, a daughter and a sister. The same traits that make us great in all of these roles are the ones that you will rely on to excel in business.”

Nadja Piatkar
Founder and President of Nadja Foods

While hiding under a table with her daughter as a bill collector banged on her front door, Nadja Piatka realized she had to do something to climb out of the rut she was stuck in. Her husband, a wealthy dentist, had left her for another woman, and the house was mortgaged to the hilt. She was bringing up two children on her own. Debts were mounting, and despite repeated job searches, no one would hire her. Crouched on the floor that day she felt humiliated that her daughter was witnessing such a low point in her life.

As the bill collector’s footsteps faded into the distance, Piatka, determined that she would never feel like that again, sat down and wrote out a list of goals. That list was her launching pad, and armed with just $100 and one big idea, she set about creating her multi-million dollar food company, now an international supplier to Subway, McDonald’s, and many more.

Recipe for success

With a lifelong love of food and cooking, she decided what the world needed was better tasting, healthier food—including a low-fat muffin. So, she started work in the kitchen, experimenting with different recipe ideas and using her two teenage children as taste testers. Eventually, she came across the perfect ingredients and her low-fat, low-calorie, tasty muffin was ready for the market.

Piatka loaded boxes of muffins in her car and sold them to coffee shops in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lived. She had no prior business knowledge, but she made deals with the storeowners that they would offer free samples and give her 10 cents for every muffin sold. They flew off the shelves. They were so successful that more stores wanted to sell them.

Demand grew

To keep up with demand, Piatka got up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to bake, and then she climbed into her car to make sure the muffins were in the coffee shops by 8:00 a.m. She realized she had a sellable product, but her growth was limited because she was working alone. So, she outsourced, finding a local bakery that had spare capacity in the ovens. The bakery signed a confidentiality agreement that she came up with on her own from an old aerobics waiver.

Now she could concentrate on marketing to get her name known. She approached a local newspaper and offered to write healthy meal makeover recipes, but they turned her down because she wasn’t a certified nutritionist. She offered to write them for free, and if the response was favorable, they could then pay her. The column was a hit and the editor paid up.

From muffins to millions

Piatka was also selling the muffins region by region, and the first big sale was to McDonald’s Canada. From there, her business exploded and the muffins made her a mint, raking in $2.5 million a year. She continued to dream big and managed to get her brownies into Subway. Now, the company is making around $20 million per year. Piatka is also successful in other fields. She’s written two best-selling books—Outrageously Delicious Fat-Wise Cookbook and Joy of Losing Weight, appeared on numerous TV shows, and created the Ultimate Girls Getaway, where she hosts women’s events at luxurious resorts to raise funds for women survivors of war.

The baked goods guru still has that original list of goals, though a little dog-eared now. The list reads: “I will own a national company, I will be a best-selling author, I will have my own newspaper column, I will be a public speaker, I will have my own television show, and I will bring value to people’s lives.” Through sheer hard work, drive, resolve, and a clear sense of purpose, she has accomplished them.

Amy Rees Anderson
CEO of MediConnect Global

Amy Rees Anderson is going places—fast. The Utah-based entrepreneur is CEO of MediConnect, a global company that digitizes and delivers medical records. Under her leadership, the company has enjoyed spectacular growth at home and overseas. Revenues have more than doubled year after year. In one 36-month period, the company’s growth rate was a record 847.1%. She’s also managed to raise more than $50 million in capital, and the company was recently identified by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the country’s fastest growing women-led companies and one of the fastest growing private companies in America. All this has been achieved without any formal business training—Rees Anderson just went out and did it. The woman who now runs a company with more than 1,000 employees in two countries started out a little over a decade ago as nothing more than a way to support her two children.

Rees Anderson was 24 when she started her first business in the 1990s with $23,000 that she managed to source from her dad, brother, and uncle. She wanted to work from home to be with her baby daughter and three-year-old son, and eventually secured a license to sell and install scheduling records in doctors’ offices. The master plan was to earn enough money to pay the bills. She had no intention to go beyond that—at least initially. Surprisingly, the business took off like wildfire, so she hired more programmers to keep up with ever increasing demand.

Get out of the bathrobe

They soon grew too big for the living room, kitchen, and garage. Rees Anderson realized if the company was to progress to the next level, she had to act. “To get serious, I realized I had to get out of the bathrobe and curlers,” she said. Despite her lack of formal business education, Rees Anderson managed to secure $2 million in venture capital to help fund new premises.

She hit the Internet and absorbed as much information as she could about sourcing finance. At that time, Rees Anderson was so naïve that during investor meetings when asked how much she needed, she replied, “Well the payroll is on the 30th.” She had no idea how long the process would take and what was involved. Naivety aside, her backers were persuaded by her passion and the money was forthcoming. After many extremely profitable years, she sold the company in 2002.

MediConnect’s savior

When MediConnect asked her to step in and take over in 2004, the company was hemorrhaging $180,000 a month. Investors were not willing to put up any more capital. Less than one year later she had completely transformed the company that now generates annual revenues of more than $35 million.

When she arrived, she did three things instrumental in bringing about change. First, she talked to everyone on the ground level—people who knew what was going on yet had no voice in the higher echelons of the company. Then, she exercised the two options that Rees Anderson claims are the only options that make you money—cutting costs and boosting sales. She outsourced some of the staffing to India and used the money that was saved to invest in the best sales people.

Not afraid of failure

Rees Anderson has never felt hampered by her lack of business training. Rather than let training constrain her, she is more willing to think outside the box. While she doesn’t knock education, especially as she now teaches entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University, Utah, she does think learning can sometimes hinder business. “I believe you learn at a deeper level when you live through it,” she said. “Every time I fail, I get smarter.”

Family and the future

Rees Anderson is now happily married, but after divorcing her first husband, she was a single mom for nine years. She successfully juggled business and family responsibilities by following the advice of her uncle, who told her to “set your rules and stick to them.” So, she always made sure that not working weekends and turning up to PTA meetings and after-school activities protected her family time.

A key to her success is visualizing. Rees Anderson has a goal poster where she puts pictures of all the things she wants to achieve. So far she has met all her objectives. Stuck to the poster today are pictures of a private jet, several charities she wants to support, and the seven wonders of the world that she plans to visit with her children.

Julie Clarkr
Entrepreneur and Founder of the Baby Einstein Company

Julie Clark, founder of the Baby Einstein Company, never planned on going into business and making millions of dollars. She was happy teaching English to college students—but then she became pregnant and quit the classroom to be a stay-at-home mom. Her life changed forever.

After her first daughter was born, Clark searched baby stores for educational material to stimulate her little girl’s development. She played, danced, and sang with her, but was after a product that would make the job easier. In her words, something that was “super baby friendly.” She wanted to expose her daughter to the things she loved like literature and classical music.

Videos for babies

Finding nothing suitable on the shop shelves, Clark started to think about the idea of making videos for babies, believing that if she couldn’t find anything, other mothers would be in the same boat. She had spotted a gap in the market.

The first video was made in the basement of her Denver home with borrowed video equipment. She used a black velvet background and toys that her daughter liked, and edited the movie on a home computer. Along with her husband, Bill, the couple robbed their savings to fund the project. It cost them $18,000—a fortune at the time, especially since Clark wasn’t working.

Pound the streets

Proud of the product but nervous about going to the market, Clark initially had no idea about marketing, so she just pounded the streets, sent copies to people, and ultimately ended up at a trade fair where a retailer picked the project up. The Right Start chain championed Baby Einstein, and five videos were put on sale in stores up and down the country. After a week, Clark received a call from the chain saying that all the videos had been sold in just one day. She was on her way and in that first year the company made $100,000 in sales—nearly five times Clark’s teaching salary.

The company grew fast, and four years in, Clark approached Disney who bought the company in 2002. Although the figure hasn’t been revealed, sales of Baby Einstein that year topped $20 million. The decision to sell was prompted by the all-consuming demands of work. As the company grew, she was spending less time with her family, and to expand would have required even more of her time.

Do-it-yourself boom

The boom in her Baby Einstein business was achieved without any market research or focus groups. In the first five years the company did not even advertise. Growth was by word of mouth and branding didn’t require meetings with marketing experts. For example, Clark doodling with a crayon at her kitchen table created the logo. The story doesn’t end there.

Put kids first

Putting kids first and watching her children grow up served as the inspiration for her latest venture—a video to help children learn about safety in a fun way. Again, noticing a gap in the market, Clark saw an opportunity to fill the needs of elementary school kids by teaching them about stranger danger. In response, she founded The Safe Side, which has now turned into another successful video series.

Life has presented setbacks as well as success. In 2004, Clark was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. While the operation set her back, she returned to the business world with new gusto and purpose.

The multimillionaire entrepreneur believes her achievements are due to many things—good products, a passionate belief in those products, and a commitment to keep work fun. As she once told CNBC, success has come from going with her instincts. “So I made a product based on what instinct told me was right for my children and that worked really well. It’s worked in my new business—it’s worked in Baby Einstein. It’s certainly worked in my life.”

Teresa Vidgerr
President and CEO of Temporary Housing Directory

Teresa Vidger’s entrepreneurial career kicked off in 2001, prompted by the premature birth of her son. Previously, she worked in the leasing relocation business in Dallas, Texas. She also helped customers who needed temporary housing locally due to company relocation or insurance claims. When her son was born five weeks premature, she took some time off, but continued to help her insurance customers find housing via the phone and Internet. After a year, she realized that she could work from home and break out on her own. She decided to start her own company, limiting her services to insurance housing relocation. From a $100,000 initial investment, she has achieved astonishing success and Temporary Housing Directory is now a $20 million enterprise.

Put the customer first

Her company is a nationwide service coordinating the selection and management of short-term housing needs of individuals displaced due to an insurance claim or corporate relocation. She believes that putting the customer first and hard work and dedication from her employees have made the company a success. “I truly believe that customer service and my dedicated team is what has given us the explosive growth. Today, too many companies take for granted the need for outstanding service. Our phones are answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week by a real person and we are always available without the use of prompts,” she said. She also has a passion for work and will only employ people who are equally as passionate. The big boss is also a team player who listens to and values the input of her team.

Adapt as needed

The rapid growth her company has enjoyed came about because of a mold crisis in Texas in the early part of this decade. Thousands of homes were filing mold claims. At the time, newspapers were reporting that the insurance industry paid out some $4 billion. Eventually, mold claims were written out of policies, so Vidger decided to go nationwide with her relocation business. The hallmark of her career is the flexibility and willingness to adapt. “I have found it is important to listen to your customers and to change the way you do business based on their feedback,” she said. “Try to not be too rigid in your business model, so you can adapt to changes when needed so you can constantly improve your service.”

Quality time

Motherhood is important to Vidger and she makes sure that quality time with her three children is just that. “I have a very supportive husband who helps me with the children when I have to travel or work late. However, I do have a home office that helps me be here for them before and after school. I believe that quality time is important and we spend the weekends together as a family since my two older kids are very involved in soccer,” she said.

Temporary Housing Directory is building from strength to strength. Growth can bring problems—especially if a company grows too fast—but Vidger is mindful of this and always ensures she has the right people in place, ready for what may lay ahead.