Now in its 53rd year, National Small Business Week celebrates the positive impact entrepreneurs and small businesses have on the economy. In honor of this week, we’ve been profiling a group of local small businesses that are connected to our work. In our final entry, we are focusing on businesses owned and operated by our own hard-working staff members.

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JumpStart routinely celebrates entrepreneurs and their success within in the Northeast Ohio community, but did you know that a number of our staff members are also entrepreneurs themselves?

To close out our small business week profiles, we sat down with a few of these team members to ask them some of the same questions we ask other entrepreneurs we work with. Our panel included:

Amy Martin, Partner, Marketing
Amy is the founder of SheInTheCle.com, a blogger collective dedicated to driving conversations with purpose by women in the Cleveland area.

Dave Moran, IT Consultant
Dave is the owner of Dave The IT Guy, an organization that assists small businesses with their big-picture technology goals and day-to-day IT needs.

Sally Schriner, Venture Partner
Sally is the creator of Let’s Play Cupid!, a crowd-sourced dating app that allows friends to play matchmaker.

Freddie Coffey, Digital Marketing Manager
Freddie is the founder of Brew Cleveland, which is preparing to launch BrewBoat CLE, Ohio’s first and only pedal-powered paddle-wheel party-boat.

 

Tell us about the history of your business. How did it all get started?

Amy, SheInTheCle.com
The idea came to me around the time the #ThisIsCLE campaign started. I love this town and everything it has to offer, but I often struggled with the lack of women in C-suite positions or at the board level.  Once the Cleveland campaign kicked off, I knew we had a shot to tie into that hometown pride, but gear something toward women, by women.

Dave, Dave The IT Guy
My business started in 2012 as a part-time endeavor to help friends with small businesses find solutions and implement technologies that they needed to grow. The idea was to get them started and then train them how to manage without me. It soon became apparent that the business owners didn’t want to run their own IT, and liked having someone to take care of it for them.

Sally, Let’s Play Cupid!
About eight years ago, after having set up two couples who ended up getting married, I had the idea to figure out a way to bring the offline, casual matchmaking experience of introducing friends to the digital world. With the proliferation of Facebook, I figured out a way to make this concept work. Last year, I sketched it out, showed it to about 25 people and then decided to build it.

Freddie, Brew Cleveland
I had the idea of starting a pedal-pub business in Cleveland a couple years ago after witnessing the success of similar operations in other cities. I discovered the cycleboat concept when researching the business model and thought it would be an excellent attraction for Cleveland’s waterfront, which I believe is significantly underutilized as a recreational resource. I made it my mission to play a small role in helping to turn that around by bringing a cycleboat operation to Cleveland.

 

What kind of obstacles have you encountered along the way?

Amy, SheInTheCle.com
Time has always been our biggest challenge. My two partners and I both have full-time jobs, so we do all of our work virtually during the evening hours or on weekends. There are weeks I should be blogging more, but I can’t squeeze it in. We look at this as a passion project and I believe our readers understand we are working women!

Dave, Dave The IT Guy
Learning how to navigate the financial side of the business and keep my own books has been an adventure. The largest obstacle has been learning how to position myself as not only someone who can get things done on time and on budget, but as an ongoing asset to my client’s organization.

Sally, Let’s Play Cupid!
Let’s Play Cupid! is very dependent on Facebook, so when they make changes, it sometimes breaks our code. Since it’s an app, you have to re-release it to the App Store and wait for changes—it’s a process. If I could have done it differently, I might have built a web-based beta version and mobile optimized it instead of having it live native in an iOS app.

Freddie, Brew Cleveland
When we launch this spring, we’ll be just the sixth cycleboat tour company in the entire world. One of the really tricky things about starting a niche business is explaining your vision and value proposition in a way that people understand. Even though we have a solid business plan, we had issues getting small business financing, because bank underwriters may not know how to assign risk to something so new.

 

Have you been able to apply knowledge gained while working at JumpStart to the development or improvement of your own business?

Amy, SheInTheCle.com
I am so lucky to be surrounded by other entrepreneurs daily, so I get a ton of inspiration from them. I also have amazing colleagues who give me advice and some even blog on our site. I would never have been able to launch this site if I were working anywhere else.

Dave, Dave The IT Guy
The most important part of JumpStart has been the relationships I’ve made here. The breadth of business knowledge held by the people at JumpStart has helped me in many ways.

Sally, Let’s Play Cupid!
I decided to bootstrap the business and stick to a budget that I set ahead of time so I could keep myself honest and not get caught up in the fun of starting something new. I’ve relied on a handful of mentors and fellow entrepreneurs to give me guidance, but to also keep me honest with the progress or lack of progress I was making.

Freddie, Brew Cleveland
Without the knowledge I’ve gained in the past four years at JumpStart, I doubt I would’ve made it through the preliminary stages of building the business. I’m also continually inspired by the entrepreneurs we work with, which is what gave me the drive to keep going and pivot my original idea into what we’re doing now.

 

How do you balance running a business with a full-time job?

Amy, SheInTheCle.com
Some days I think I do it well and some days I really fail. If you ask my husband or kids they would say they get the short end of the stick. I will skip out on a movie night or a weekend breakfast if I have to review submissions or if I am on deck to write a blog. There are days when I simply need to be honest with my family and tell them I need some time to work, and they get it.

Dave, Dave The IT Guy
Having a full-time job while starting my own business meant that I was only available nights and weekends, and I had to balance the needs of my clients with the needs of my family. I missed not only family dinners and reading bedtime stories to my daughter, but I also missed business opportunities because of my availability. The decision to go full-time with my own company was very scary, but it meant that I could take on new clients, service my existing clients much better and spend time with my family.

Sally, Let’s Play Cupid!
I have found in the last six months that I’m not very good at this.  When we were in the conception and development phases I was able to do work when I got home after my kids were in bed and on weekends, because my development team is in Spain. But I really haven’t been able to give it the attention it deserves with so many other things going on.

Freddie, Brew Cleveland
I get this question a lot. Mostly because people that know me also know that I have three daughters under the age of five. Whether out of habit or necessity, I’ve learned to live on very little sleep, which has been pretty tough. I try my best to make weekends all about family time, but that can be hard with a lot of calls coming in from prospective BrewBoat customers, and I’ll be working on the boat tours during the weekends this summer.

 

What are you future plans for your business? Where do you see it in 5 years?

Amy, SheInTheCle.com
In year one, we wanted to create content that was purposeful, build relationships with other women in town and make sure that everyone understood the mission of what we were trying to do. We are starting to plan for year two—discussing becoming a social enterprise and thinking about how to monetize and possibly moving into podcasting.

Dave, Dave The IT Guy
I see myself in a position to have someone working with me at least part-time. I also plan to continue to form alliances with other service providers who can support client needs that I may be unable or unavailable to handle. In five years, no matter the size or number of clients, I aim to be profitable and ensure my client needs are met.

Sally, Let’s Play Cupid!
The dating space is so competitive and dynamic. I’m taking it pretty slow and steady, but that might not be the appropriate pace for the marketplace. I need to concentrate on consumer adoption and feature enhancements that drive that adoption. Ellen DeGeneres and Drew Barrymore just announced they are going to produce a dating show, so I’d love to figure out how to partner with them!

Freddie, Brew Cleveland
We have a pretty aggressive five-year growth plan. If we get the reception we’re expecting, and early sales indicate we will, we plan to increase both the number of vessels and types of tours available in the near future.