Young Entrepreneurs

20-somethings share the challenges and experiences that steered them in to business for themselves

Story by Sean Fitzgerald

Entrepreneurship isn’t for the faint of heart.

Especially when you’re young, fresh out of school, and just starting out a career. For a handful of young professionals, going into business for themselves early in their career as opposed to working for another employer has taken a leap of faith – as well as some occasional set-backs and sacrifices that peers their same age don’t have to suffer.

Nationally, there’s been fewer 20-somethings going into business for themselves in the past two years compared with those doing so in the early part of the decade or during the 1990s. A less robust national economy coupled with a greater awareness of the impact of high health care costs may be fueling a bit more conservative approach to starting a business at an early age.

“The trend of people in their 20s going into business for themselves has been regressing toward having more security the past few years,” said Burk Tower, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

Even in the Young Entrepreneur Society, a student organization based in the College of Business Administration at UW-Oshkosh, Tower said there’s been almost no students who’ve gone directly into entrepreneurship the past three or four years, a departure from half a decade ago when a few handfuls of 20-somethings were taking the plunge to start their own businesses.

“A lot of (current students) have said they’d like to do it someday, but right now they’re not ready to take the risk,” noted Tower.

Younger entrepreneurs are often at a disadvantage when it comes to life and work experiences, which are often where entrepreneurial experiences are discovered, Tower said. They also may not have the credit or financial wherewithal to launch a business venture.

But there are advantages to starting out early. With fewer obligations like children, mortgages, and other mounting debt, a young entrepreneur can sometimes fully dedicate themselves to their business. And because they perceive having a lifetime to gain wealth, the risk of a short-term loss doesn’t appear quite as daunting.

“There’s a mindset where there is an opportunity that owning your own business is not that much more of a risk,” said Jerry Baltus, a business consultant with The Entrepreneur’s Source in Wisconsin. “The traditional job market seems to be causing the most turmoil.”

Students coming out of college today hear statistics about working for more than 10 employers during their lifetime, Baltus said, a much more unstable job market compared to the one their parents experienced. Baltus has spoken with a number of younger would-be entrepreneurs about the prospect of franchising, because a successful concept and business plan has already been developed. It can be less risky than starting a business from the ground up.

Whether it’s to move up the corporate ladder faster, earn more money, or control their own destiny, young entrepreneurs face their challenges with a high level of enthusiasm and optimism. We had a chance to speak to five northeast Wisconsin entrepreneurs who started their own business in their 20s. All have different paths to entrepreneurship, and all have experienced varying degrees of success to date. Here, they share their stories of personal and business growth, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

No. 1 at No. 2
Picking up doggie doo doo is about the least appealing activity you might imagine when figuring out how to make a buck.

And that’s part of what drove Allan Dreblow into the business.

Just a few years out of college after earning a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Dreblow worked fulltime for a national cellular telephone company, conducting outside business-to-business sales in northeast Wisconsin. The job offered him flexibility to make his own schedule, but also allowed him to meet a number of small business owners across the region while making sales calls. With each meeting, Dreblow asked himself, ‘What supernatural characteristic allowed someone to be a business owner?’ And, ‘Did (he) have what it took to go into business for (himself)?’

“What I found is that every entrepreneur had a passion for what they were doing,” he said.

Longing to become his own boss, Dreblow began researching entrepreneurship on the Internet and recollected the entrepreneurship class he had as part of his studies at UW-Oshkosh. He discovered opportunity existed in doing chores that people don’t typically like to do for themselves – house cleaning, pet grooming, lawn and yard work, and yes, even picking up after the messes that other people’s pets leave behind.

In December 2005, at the age of 26, Dreblow launched K9 Poop Patrol, though he still kept his fulltime job in the cell phone industry while picking up for his dog-owner clients on nights and weekends. During that period, Dreblow also held a newspaper delivery route in the morning, and occasionally delivered pizzas in his remaining spare time to save up enough money to strike out on his own full time.

“That’s my advice to new entrepreneurs. Work extra. Have some savings built up. The first one or two years, you don’t want to take anything out of the business,” Dreblow said.

That following spring, business took off.

The subtle wit and humility of Dreblow’s personality coupled with Americans’ cultural paradigms about doggie doo doo gave birth to brilliant, low-cost marketing for K9 Poop Patrol. It’s tag line, “We’re number one at number two,” has become well known on radio advertisements across the Fox Valley.

“Things grew faster than I thought they would. I wasn’t prepared for that,” Dreblow said.

Six months after starting his business, Dreblow finally gave up his day job in the cell phone industry to focus more exclusively on growing K9 Poop Patrol.

Two years later, Dreblow has evolved the business into a menu of other yard care services as well, including lawn maintenance and snow removal. He’s modified the name and identity of his business as well, now simply calling it The Bulldog.

With a roster of more than 170 customers whose yards are scooped by The Bulldog, and an additional 25 clients each for lawn maintenance and snow removal, Dreblow’s business is growing at a more manageable pace. He currently has one employee, and plans to add two more employees to help this upcoming winter. By next spring, Dreblow would ideally like to have two employees in the field and another back in the office managing customer accounts and the other affairs of the company.

Through all of his experiences, Dreblow has managed to be efficient and wise with his resources, and has steadily grown the business without much liability.

“The biggest challenge I’ve had is people telling me I can’t and won’t make it,” Dreblow said. “Business comes down to two things: discovering a need, and providing for it. We try to do the best job possible of fulfilling the needs of our customers.”

The Local Dog Whisperer
From picking UP after dogs to training them, entrepreneurial opportunity abounds.

Canine psychologist and dog obedience trainer Kirstin Zaspel said entrepreneurship never crossed her mind her entire life until struggling to find a satisfying job after wrapping her master’s degree in experimental psychology a little more than a year ago.

Zaspel always had an affinity toward animals. In fact, she’d gone off to college with intentions of studying pre-veterinarian science, and although she proved a whiz at biology, she struggled to enjoy the chemistry component of her studies.

After finishing her bachelor’s degree in biology from St. Olaf College (Minn.), Zaspel worked in a Twin Cities biological research laboratory, where her day consisted of activities like examining different varieties of proteins, harvesting mice kidneys or running fecal tests.

It was interesting work, Zaspel explained, “But there wasn’t much opportunity to advance.”

In 2005, Zaspel and her husband moved back to her hometown of Appleton. She had tried her hand working in a few area vet clinics, but didn’t feel the animals were treated like patients. She struggled to come to terms with what she called “the business side” of running a veterinary clinic.

While in college, she had run a pet therapy program where animals are brought into nursing homes to offer some companionship to residents. Between that and her experiences at the vet clinics, Zaspel discovered an emerging interest in animal behavior and canine psychology. She decided to go back to school, enrolling in the master’s program for experimental psychology at UW-Oshkosh.

Upon graduating in the spring of 2007, Zaspel had every intention of using her new set of skills working for an employer. Challenged to find a job that was a good fit, she became frustrated until learning about the E-Seed entrepreneurial training program through The Venture Center at Fox Valley Technical College. She enrolled in the program, and thought – for a moment – that perhaps she, too, could have her own business.

“Why am I investing all this time in finding a job that I don’t want to do, when I can invest it in starting and growing a business?” Zaspel asked herself.

With the help of some fellow E-Seed classmates, Zaspel developed a logo, brochure and other basic marketing materials needed to launch Beyond Obedience at the beginning of this year. Her start-up costs were minimal. With no children, and a husband with a job that could support both of them as well as provide health insurance, Zaspel’s business venture could afford a slow start.

But is it crazy to think there’s a market in the Fox Valley for pet behaviorists?

Zaspel explained that in the $41 billion a year pet industry in the U.S., pet owners buy clothes for their dogs, take them to doggie day care, even to day spas for dogs. On a leisurely Saturday morning in downtown Appleton, pets and their owners might stroll into Two Paws Up Bakery, where Zaspel is beginning to teach new puppy training courses for pups and their owners.

“People are doing more and more to treat their pets like members of the family,” she said.

In just the past eight months, Zaspel has been building her business by networking with area veterinary clinics, dog day care centers, and retail shops like Two Paws Up. She acknowledges that business has picked up much more slowly than she expected, but realizes that she’s still becoming accustomed to the role of selling herself and her business.

An early start
While many teen-agers and 20-somethings struggle to find what they want to do in their career, running enthusiast Ross McDowell has known since he was 17 years old that he wanted to open a running store.

During high school and his college years at UW-Oshkosh, McDowell worked for a running shoe store back in his Madison-area hometown. A state champion mid-distance runner while in high school and a member of the men’s track team at UW-Oshkosh, McDowell sold running shoes to friends and teammates out of his dorm room while in college.

Beside extra-curricular activities, his studies had a poignant focus as well - while working on his marketing degree with an emphasis in entrepreneurship, many of his class projects involved scenarios for starting up a running shoe store.

A month after graduating in 2004, McDowell opened his first store in downtown Oshkosh – Movin’ Shoes, a partnership with his former employer who owned a store by the same name in Madison. The partnership was something like a franchise agreement. McDowell borrowed the name of an existing, well-established running store, and was able to latch on to the same network of vendors for merchandise and fixtures to set up the store.

But he took on a heap of debt, and the agreement called for McDowell to share 10 percent of his profits each month with his Madison-area partner. Not finding much value in the partnership, McDowell broke off on his own in 2006 and rebranded his store as Run Away Shoes. At the same time, McDowell was developing plans to open a second store in Green Bay, which didn’t have a specialty running shoe store at the time.

“It was getting to a point where it was grow or die,” McDowell said.

When opening his Green Bay store in January 2007, McDowell took a much different approach than the first store. Rather than moving into the downtown, Run Away Shoes moved into a brand new multi-tenant strip mall near U.S. Highway 41, right next to a Starbucks coffee shop. A smaller, more manageably sized retail space than his first store, McDowell was able to set the store up with fixtures, a computer and signs for about $6,000. The store carried fewer apparel items, which generally cycle through inventory much slower than shoes.

By May 2007 – with Run Away Shoes in Green Bay growing at a steady rate – McDowell moved his Oshkosh store from downtown out to the highway, and saw his business more than double. It was a strategic move, McDowell noted, because more than 60 percent of the customers at his Oshkosh store came from outside of the area.

Whether it was early on as Movin’ Shoes or more recently as Run Away Shoes, McDowell had always employed a handful of friends and other running enthusiasts in the store at a nominal rate of $8 to $10 an hour. That’s left McDowell to do the scheduling, the ordering, and paying the bills. But he’d rather be out meeting with local high school and college track and cross-country coaches, striking deals to encourage their athletes to shop his store before the season begins. So, this coming fall, McDowell plans to create his first store manager staff position, freeing up his schedule to grow the business elsewhere.

“You realize what you’re good at and what you’re not good at,” McDowell said. “When you find people around you who do the other things well, use them for all they’re worth. Pay them well, and respect them.”

With two retail stores and an eye out on the horizon for additional opportunities, McDowell said owning a business is a completely different ballgame now than when he first started. But those challenges of staffing, moving inventory and growing his visibility in the running community is what he’s come to enjoy most.

“I love running. But I love business more than I love running.”

Selling on ethics, environment
Entrepreneurship never seemed too far-fetched to Drew Mueske.

The son of a business owner in Ripon, Mueske grew up working for his father from adolescence through high school, and became accustomed to the sometimes-unusual hours and tasks a small business owner takes on themselves.

But it wasn’t necessarily a goal of Mueske’s either when he began working toward his art major at UW-Oshkosh with an emphasis in graphic design. While in college, Mueske dabbled in making T-shirts for friends and various organizations. He even began selling shirts – often with environmental, political and anti-war messages – at well-attended festivals and events around the area.

After graduating from college in 2003, Mueske went to work as a graphic artist for a local advertising agency. With the goal of building his T-shirt hobby into a more formal business, Mueske enrolled in the E-Seed program in 2004, one of the entrepreneurial training program’s earliest sessions.

Shortly after starting the 15-week program, the agency Mueske worked for went through a downsizing and eliminated his position. He began thinking about doing graphic design contract work.

“I only went through the E-Seed program to develop Progress Label Clothing,” Mueske said. “By the time I was done with the program those plans had changed.”

Mueske was quick to adapt his plans, and used the remainder of his time in the E-Seed program to develop Progress Media, a marketing communications company. Today, the company conducts brand development and identity, creates marketing collateral and designs Web sites for its clients.

“I had always had in the back of my mind that I’d like to have my own business,” Mueske said. “It never seemed that far out of reach.”

Starting out, Mueske cleverly took advantage of the no-interest credit card offers rained down upon young college students looking to establish credit. He’d max the card out in three weeks, but always made payments on time in order to avoid paying finance charges and penalties. When the no-interest offer expired after a year or so, he’d apply for a new card.

It wasn’t a textbook approach to financing a business, but it provided Mueske with the resources he needed.
“I never paid a dime of interest during that time,” he said. “Even though I was an art student, I’ve always been good with my money.”

Today, Mueske attends about 18 various environmental and political events a year – such as the annual Midwest Renewable Energy Fair – where he sets up shop in a vendor booth and sells his T-shirts. The people and other businesses he’s met at such events have often become clients for the marketing side of his company.

As a result, Progress Media has developed a reputation for helping clients promote their green and ethical attributes. His clients include organic foods distributors and retailers of eco-friendly, free trade products. It’s a niche Mueske believes has substantial potential for the future.

“True green businesses – and areas like organic foods – are continuing to grow,” he said.

A career adjustment
Owning a business has continually evolved as a work in progress for Dr. Andrew Judkins, a Fond du Lac chiropractor who went out on his own about a year after graduating from chiropractic school.

Starting his own practice was never much of a goal, though, during his training or at the time that he started his career in an Appleton chiropractic clinic in late 2003.

“When I first started, I was just focused on treating patients,” Judkins said.

Just months into his career, Judkins said he found his philosophy in working with patients differing from his employer. So much so, that – at the urging of his wife – Judkins decided to return to his hometown of Fond du Lac and open a clinic in June 2005 at the age of 27.

Judkins, who turned 30 this past May, said his schooling didn’t necessarily train him for business management functions like filing claims with his patients’ health insurance companies. In the early days of his new business, the young chiropractor said he received certain checks from the insurance carriers written out for the sum of $0, an indication that he erred in processing the claim.

“That’s one of the things I said when I left (school) is that we needed more business education.”

Judkins launched his new clinic as efficiently as possible. With he and his wife expecting their first child, he didn’t feel comfortable taking on a substantial amount of debt with the uncertainty that starting a first entrepreneurial venture can bring.

He was able to find an affordable building to lease for his office, and found low-cost, used tables and equipment for treating his patients. Judkins didn’t hire any staff during his first two years – he took care of all the billing and paperwork himself. He even cleaned the office and mowed the lawn.

“I’ll admit, it was kind of scary. I went from being busy all the time to being much, much slower,” he said.

Through a steady regiment of getting involved in community and networking groups, Judkins slowly grew his roster of patients without having to spend much money on marketing. By taking the time to educate his patients on the treatment he was providing, he soon found his patients selling Judkins Chiropractic through referrals to their friends and family.

Over time, the success of word-of-mouth referrals brought Judkins more patients than he could handle while still managing the office and answering the phones. Never one to answer the phone while he was with a patient, he found more and more calls going into voice mail. Soon Judkins hired a service to do the cleaning, then another to take care of the lawn.

In late 2007, he hired his first employee to help answer phones, greet patients, and follow up with insurance companies. At first, it was a bit uncomfortable for Judkins.

“I had my hand on every part of the business, and I kind of liked that,” he said. “But you start to realize that any free time you have is important. It’s my time to spend at home with my family.”