The New Builders
The New Builders, Face to Face with the True Future of Business, Seth Levine and Elizabeth MacBride, Wiley 2021
How much money does it take to start a new business? Authors Levine and MacBride cite new examples of successful entrepreneurs, and they aren't all young, male geeks. In fact, a Dominican baker started her own company with $37 in food stamps. And Steve Murray, a small store operator in Lancaster, Pa, with a dream of how to reinvigorate a shrinking town took his idea higher than anyone thought possible. We're looking at a new different group of entrepreneurs, and we want them to succeed.
If you believe that 65% of US business activity derives from small businesses, and these companies have in fact been severely set back by the pandemic, then this message in the midst of crazy times is critical for the US' recovery. Sure, it takes money, usually more than $37 worth of food stamps, for an idea to get on the map and start moving. When Charles Goodyear in 1844 launched his vulcanized rubber company, he had already failed five times and his family was stuck in poverty; America was ready for his miraculous product, but Goodyear had to find the right formula to keep his raw material stable and workable.
When Danaris Mazara launched her Sweet Grace Heavenly Cakes bakery in 2008, we were looking at the dot-com downturn, but the pandemic lockdown was worse. As soon as Massachusetts' Governor Charlie Baker lifted the pandemic shutdown on nonessential businesses in late May 2020, Mazara did not know what to expect. She had had eight women working in the bakery turning out elaborate wedding creations and other delicious cake treats. But there was a lot of uncertainty, which meant uneven cash flow, and for employees in the former mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, that meant living on the edge. The day before Sweet Grace had taken in 12 orders, but in ordinary times that number would have been 100.
This time, however, the covid shutdown was affecting everyone, and no one knew when the end would come. In the first seven weeks of closure Mazara used up her personal savings to pay a home mortgage and her business renovation loan. She even managed to pay her employees for a week. But it couldn't last.
The challenge when she started in business had come after her husband was laid off from a paperboard factory and she found herself with a newborn daughter. Bankruptcy loomed large, and she needed more than her Samsung job for them to get by. The answer was flan - she had never baked it, but she knew the flavor, and based on a niece's borrowed recipe after one failed attempt her second batch worked! Packaged and sold at her Samsung break table for $6 a piece she turned the $37 in foodstamps flan ingredients into $500 cash money! Cake, specifically fancy decorated cakes, came next, seemingly out of nowhere. Here again, her drive combined with help from a neighborhood friend who spent three Saturdays at Danaris' kitchen training her made all the difference - " When she did that (demonstrated how to make frosting), I immediately got it. She was amazed at how fast I learned."
It was, however, one giant step from baking a dozen cakes on weekends in her home kitchen, to quitting her Samsung job and finding and renovating a former hair salon to increase volumes. What it took - in addition to her incredible focus and yes, desperate drive, was money, back-up funding from an entrepreneurial philathropic capital fund, Entrepreneurship for All. . And that made all the difference.
Patricia E. Moody
FORTUNE magazine "Pioneering Woman in Mfg"
IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert
A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, patriciaemoody@gmail.com