It Ain't Over (29 page)

Then, the fun stuff: teaming with her brother, an amateur photographer, to take product shots for her website and designing pretty petal-shape packages containing fun, inspirational fitness quotes.

It was exciting to take this new turn in her life, and Paula was grateful she and Bill had the resources to make it happen. So they decided it was time to give back: If the company made it, they’d donate 10 percent of the proceeds to two nonprofit organizations. They chose the YMCA and Trailnet, a nonprofit that develops bike and pedestrian trails.

In 2011, Paula’s Web business, under the name “Chainspirations,” was launched. To get the word out, she contacted the TV reporter who had presented her the Healthy Woman of the Year award, who then featured Paula on a local morning show; she set up a display table at the YMCA; and Trailnet handed out brochures at the bike rides they sponsored. Then the owner of a local outdoors store asked to carry her jewelry at all three of its locations. They were in business.

Next, Paula signed up to be a vendor at the Tour de Grove, a local bike race, and logged in a lot of face time with customers. That experience proved
so valuable that she signed up for more; and by the end of the summer, Paula took a giant step and decided to sell her jewelry at a bike race ten hours away: The Hotter ’N Hell Hundred in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Paula understood this was a risky investment—she’d have to pay $400 for the booth, plus spring for a hotel room for herself and Bill—but she also knew that the attendance would be high, with 12,000 riders. And the gamble paid off: Visitors loved the idea that she could make a custom piece for them in ten minutes. She sold $2,000 worth of jewelry during the three-day show. Since then, Paula, with Bill as her trusty wingman, has traveled to bike rides all over the country, from New York and Arkansas to Washington and California.

In addition to seeing her business thrive, Paula discovered a hidden bonus in the work: “Bill and I found out that we’re a really good pair working together,” she says. “It’s given our relationship a whole different dimension.”

Since the business launched three years ago, sales have been comfortably consistent, totaling around 2,000 pieces of jewelry a year, including four styles of earrings, two bracelets, eight necklaces, and 23 decorative zipper-pulls.

“I have no idea where this creativity is coming from,” Paula marvels. “I’ve always considered myself a left-brained person, big into numbers and computers, but I love sitting there and creating.”

Paula’s goal now is just to break even, so when she turns a profit, she puts it back into the company. She also offers deep discounts to individuals and teams who use her jewelry to raise money for their causes. And once a year, she drops off a check in person at the YMCA and Trailnet.

“If I were doing this just to make a profit, I don’t think I’d have the same passion for it,” Paula says. “Being able to give back is what I truly love.”

Judy Peres, 67

Chicago, Illinois

F
or most of the quarter-century that Judy Peres’s byline was a regular fixture on the front page of the
Chicago Tribune
, it’s fair to say she seldom thought about a second career—and it’s a sure bet that on those rare occasions when such a notion
did
flit through her mind, she did not envision herself driving a forklift for a living.

But today Judy is the CEO of Old Globe Reclaimed Wood Company, a Wisconsin outfit with aspirations far bigger than its shoestring staff. Which means there are days when Judy has to pull herself away from her financial statements and climb in behind the wheel. “Everyone should try it. It’s a blast.”

Judy had been a classic casualty of the Internet, which had all but eclipsed the newspaper and magazine business. She had come to the
Trib
in 1980 after a 12-year stint at the
Jerusalem Post
, working first as an editor, then as a
Tribune
feature reporter.

“I loved my job,” she says. “It was interesting and exciting. There were
years when the
Trib
paid me to do nothing but follow things that caught my eye.”

But as the twentieth century wound down, and the Internet geared up, newspaper managers had to reduce their budgets, cutting even star writers like Judy.

“I felt like I had a bull’s-eye on my back,” she says. “I could see the end coming, and I didn’t know who I would be the day I stopped being a journalist.”

While all this was happening, Judy’s partner, a former investment banker named David Hozza, made an interesting discovery: There was an enormous granary called the Globe Elevator Company eight hours away in Superior, Wisconsin, made entirely of rare old-growth pine, and it was slated for demolition. He wanted to save it and salvage the lumber. So he bought it.

David took Judy to see the granary. From the outside, 15 stories high, it resembled a Jenga tower before anyone has removed a piece. But inside the grain bins, the wood was
gorgeous
. The flow of tons of grain pouring in and out of the bins over the years had worn the most beautiful patterns into the wood. A forest’s worth of exquisite and irreplaceable wood was destined for a landfill.

At first, Judy was happy merely to support David in his pet project. “I was still working at the paper so I made an initial small investment,” she says. But with money at stake and her journalistic curiosity piqued, Judy began to research the project, and it soon became clear that David had underestimated the challenge of recovering the wood.

“We planned to have the first of the three granary buildings down in a year, and the others would follow,” says Judy. “But the recovery was much more difficult than we’d imagined. Stacking the lumber turned out to be a very complicated process; and there was a lot of trial and error until we brought in heavy machinery. We had raised $250,000 for the operating
budget—which came from Dave, me, and several other investors—and went through all of it without getting a single board onto the ground. We had to figure out what we were doing wrong, and at the same time master other facets of the business, like marketing and finance strategies.” And of course, learning how to drive a forklift.

As life at the newspaper became more untenable, Judy became increasingly immersed in the Old Globe project. Eventually the threads all came together. She took a buyout from the
Tribune
and became Old Globe’s CEO.

“Why not? Our kids were grown and we could afford to do something wonderful, risky, and challenging. And once I made the decision, I realized that all that time I’d spent worrying about leaving the paper had been a complete waste. I don’t miss the paper at all. I’ve been too challenged to miss it. And here’s the bonus: I’m stronger, leaner, healthier, and calmer than when I worked at the paper. I look, and feel, ten years younger.”

Unfortunately, at first their lumber company wasn’t as fit as she was. The recession and the housing glut dealt blows to their prospects. “Recycled, aged wood is actually more expensive than cutting new growth,” Judy explains. “Our wood is for high-end consumers who are
looking for something special in their home, office, restaurant—whatever they’re doing. We thought those people would have deep enough pockets to keep us going throughout the recession, but they didn’t and we had to shut down for a while.”

But things eventually picked up. The company salvaged about 18 percent of the lumber in the complex, and the high-end buyers began to return. Customers included an oil company executive who used the timbers in his home in Colorado, a lakefront hotel in Wisconsin that features reception desks constructed out of the bin walls, and an upscale Chicago restaurant whose entire floor was handcrafted from two-by-eight planks from the granary.

And most surprising of all, Old Globe’s team was featured on episodes of the History Channel’s program
Ax Men
. Not bad for a group of people trying to take a building down.

“It’s been a great adventure and very gratifying,” Judy says. “Every time we see our beautiful boards in a new building we say to each other, ‘We saved those babies!’ ”

Editor’s note: Before this story went to press, the bank foreclosed on Old Globe—but for Judy, it was all worth it. “I don’t regret a minute of it,” she says. “The stress was significant at times, but I learned a great deal. I count my blessings.”

“Taking a chance led me toward a more fulfilling life, the kind of life I want to show my children it’s possible to lead.”

Sari Davidson, 40

Bellevue, Washington

“O
h, dammit!”

Sari Davidson’s one-year-old son, Jake, had just downloaded his sippy cup onto the kitchen floor. In recent weeks, Jake had elevated his cup-chucking to a minor art form:

He dropped it from his high chair.

He upended it into his car seat, where the slow dribble would soak his clothes.

He let it slip quietly over the side of his stroller, where its absence would go unnoticed until Sari was five blocks away.

When Sari reacted with exasperation, it just made Jake laugh. “Oh, you booginhead!” she’d say, booginhead being the family term for someone who does something he or she shouldn’t do, just to get a reaction out of mom.

But one day Sari reached her limit—she
had
to find a tether for that sippy cup. So she looked in stores. She looked in catalogs. She questioned her friends.
“Nope, never heard of such a thing, but let us know if you find something,” they told her. Flying sippy cups were driving
them
crazy, too.

As it turned out, Sari never did find a sippy cup leash. But she did find her niche.

From the time she was little, Sari had wanted to be in business. In grade school, she’d sometimes join her father when he had to work on Saturdays, taking the train from their home in Smithtown, New York, to his office at Wells Fargo Bank in Manhattan.

“I’d pretend to carry a briefcase and sit at a desk and type,” she recalls. “I always saw myself as a businesswoman.”

As a teen, she watched her mother open a bookstore in a local strip mall. “The store sold new and used books, especially collectibles,” Sari recalls. “Mom worked seven days a week, getting up early to hit yard sales and flea markets to find interesting titles. Within a year, she’d driven the other bookstore in her mall out of business and opened a second shop.”

At the University of Arizona, Sari studied business. “If they’d offered a program in entrepreneurship, I would have studied that,” she says, “but they didn’t. So I majored in human resources.”

After college, she put that degree to good use, working in H.R. at, among others, New Line Cinema and Microsoft. But Sari felt something was missing—she still wanted to run her own show.

But it wasn’t until that day in 2005, when Jake sent his sippy cup skittering across the kitchen floor once too often, that Sari Davidson, inventor and entrepreneur, was born.

Using dog leashes and an $80 sewing machine that she had set up in the corner of her living room, Sari fashioned a number of straps that would attach to a cup to keep it from going airborne.

“It was like a crafts project,” she says. “I would work something up, then
take it down to the park to see what other parents thought. One of them suggested we use suction material to attach the strap to the bottle or cup. That’s how I came up with the name SippiGrip.”

In early 2007, finally happy with her invention, Sari formed BooginHead LLC and began the task of learning how to make and sell her invention.

Her first big break had already happened: She worked for Microsoft. “They gave me a completely flexible schedule. As long as I achieved the results they’d set for me, they were supportive of me having interests outside the office.”

Her second break came when she demonstrated the SippiGrip at a children’s products trade show in Las Vegas. Target took a look and was impressed enough to offer Sari a spot in its Parent-Invented Product Program.

“It was like getting an MBA,” she says. The program taught Sari about finance, manufacturing, and marketing, prepping her for many of the challenges BooginHead would face before it could become a sustainable business.

“One of the first issues we had was getting enough capital to manufacture it,” she says. “In the beginning, the entire business was financed out of my own personal bank account, but that wasn’t going to be enough. We still needed about $10,000 to start manufacturing. So my husband and I took out a second mortgage on our house. Within a year, I was able to open a business line of credit and pay myself back the initial investment.”

The actual manufacturing was also difficult. Sari hoped to find a factory in the United States, but couldn’t locate one that would make such small quantities, so she turned to China. “Communicating with people who live far away and speak a different language created lots of unexpected issues,” she recalls.

But when the first batch rolled off the assembly line, she says, “It was all worth it. To see a product that I had first stitched together in my living room being mass-produced—with packaging, a brand, and a logo—it was thrilling.”