By Jaclyn Youhana Garver
Entrepreneurs, in general, share a range of traits: a certainty in their ideas, a desire to fill a need in the community, and a pride in their work.
While overarching wants may be similar, the people behind the ambition bring their own histories and goals to their businesses. Four local women share what got them going on their own entrepreneurial paths and what they wish they knew at the onset.
Meet: Nkonye Mwalilu of New Village Braid
Getting started: Nkonye Mwalilu is right at the precipice of taking off with her business, New Village Braid. Mwalilu, of Fort Wayne, has taken all her MBA training and put it into running profit and loss numbers, figuring out a business plan and assuring all the planning stages are straightened out so that, once she finds a building to lease, she’ll be ready to go.
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| Nkonye Mwalilu of New Village Braid |
The idea: Mwalilu has lived in Fort Wayne for seven years. She had her children here, and she has a corporate job here. “It’s home,” she says, “and it’s time to start decorating.”
She wants to do that with New Village Braid, which will be a salon that specializes in braiding. Mwalilu is first-generation Nigerian-American. She’s lived in Nashville, Dallas, New York, and Shanghai, Nigeria—and she’s braided hair in all those places.
“Locally, there are braiders,” she says, “but they rent a booth in a salon that doesn’t specialize in braiding, or they’re travel braiders who visit clients’ homes, or clients visit braiders in their homes.
“I want to bring this elevated hair-braiding experience, where a client can come in and feel pampered and feel like the focus,” she says.
Braiding can take anywhere from two to 10 hours, and when she gets her hair braided, “I want to feel comfortable there. I want to know my needs are considered.”
The same is true for stylists’ needs.
Advice: Do the legwork before getting started. “Take the business courses,” Mwalilu says. “Watch videos and learn the financial side of business and marketing.”
Meet: Amber Harper of Burned-In Teacher
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| Amber Harper of Burned-In Teacher |
The idea: For 12 years, Amber Harper was a teacher, a profession with notoriously stressed-out employees. When she struggled with burnout and asked for help, she was told to go for a run. Drink more water. Practice self-care. But she did all that.
“What I wanted was a process to not feel so crappy all the time,” says Harper. “I wanted to create something that nobody else could offer to me when I was struggling.”
Enter Burned-In Teacher, which started with a blog in 2016. Harper spent two years running the blog, which provided advice for dealing with teacher burnout, before she left education and started to run her business full-time. Today, Harper teaches educators strategies that help reverse burnout.
Advice: Find a group of like-minded people to provide support.
“You can’t always just talk to your (spouse) or friends who all have that mindset, who’ve worked a 9-to-5,” she says. “They don’t get this idea of entrepreneurship. It’s scary. It’s different. There’s a lot of risk involved. They could (be) holding you back, where you think you can’t even start.”
Meet: Jacqueline Irby of Duchess J Boutique
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| Jacqueline Irby of Duchess J Boutique |
Getting started: When Jacqueline Irby started Duchess J Boutique, she did not take out a single loan. Instead, she worked slowly: She heard about an opening in a building she liked, and in September 2014, she leased it. The boutique started in a small room. When she got paid at her full-time job running a daycare, she would purchase store décor. A few years later, she was able to lease the entire building.
“I was resourceful,” says Irby. “I’m a single parent of two daughters and a foster parent of two daughters. I’ve always had that drive, and I just did what I could.”
Advice: Have a business plan. See what kind of grant money is available to help. And make sure the business is what you really, really want to do—then don’t get discouraged if things get rocky.
“I see people get started, and they stop quickly,” Irby says. “I think a lot of people see (success), and say, ‘I can do that.’”
Meet: Julie Hurd of Moo-Over
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| Julie Hurd of Moo-Over |
Getting started: Before opening her ice cream shop in Columbia City, Julie Hurd was a chef and she made ice cream for the restaurant. When it closed, Hurd found classes in Texas for vegan ice cream (rather, ice crème, since there’s no dairy to make it cream) because hers wasn’t quite at the desired quality yet.
“I was blown away,” Hurd says. “I came back, and I said, ‘I’m going to jump off a bridge and do something I’ve never done before.’ It’s scary.”
In November, she opened Moo-Over, which offers both ice cream and crème. Her favorite flavor is the rocky road, which is non-dairy, gluten-free and organic, and Moo-Over’s most popular flavors are cookies and crème, cookie dough and coffee crunch.
Hurd makes all her ice crème from scratch, right down to the chocolate chips, and she purchases her ice cream from an Indianapolis woman who also makes her products from scratch.
Advice: You know the 50-page business plan everyone talks about? “Don’t bother,” Hurd says. She struggled with it for the longest time, but when she went to the bank for her loan, the banker told her, “’Julie, do not bring me 50 pages of a business plan,’” Hurd says. “Just wrap it up, and it should be no more than two or three pages.”
Special thanks to Leslee Hill, Director of WEOC Women’s Business Center at The NIIC for connecting us to these women.
Resources:
Burned-In Teacher, burnedinteacher.com
Duchess J Boutique, duchessjboutique.com
Moo-Over, moo-over.com
New Village Braid, newvillagebraid.com
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