Entrepreneurship

One D.C. entrepreneur made the rare decision to forfeit her high-paying career at a law firm and embrace her creative side by going into the kitchen and whipping up cake pops. That daring leap led Yael Krigman to open the area’s first-ever store dedicated to cake pops, a cakepoppery called Baked by Yael.

As a buttoned-up law firm associate, Krigman’s desire for a more lighthearted work environment began when she started a tradition known as “Monday Treats,” where she would bring in baked goods she made from scratch to counteract the doldrums of her office environment.

With a keen eye for alluring design and a mission to showcase and honor the one-of-a-kind flair of different local communities, Designing Local is a consulting firm that seeks to bring the inner-beauty of a given locale to the forefront.

Based in Columbus, Ohio, Designing Local is celebrating a big milestone – one year in business of bringing pride, legacy and prosperity to the projects and communities they take on.

What happens when you put more than 100 small business owners in a room together to discuss the biggest issues facing small businesses today? That’s what we found out during our inaugural Small Business Leadership Summit, a three-day event of education, collaboration and action that took place May 11-13 in our nation’s capitol.

For a professional baker, nothing could be worse than discovering the thing you love the most is detrimental to your health. But that’s what bake lover Michelle Retik began to realize when she was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis.

Small Business Majority CEO, John Arensmeyer

By all accounts, our economy is continuing on a path of recovery in the aftermath of the recession. And while this should signal good times ahead for our nation’s small businesses, entrepreneurs are still struggling to get what they need most to grow and thrive: access to traditional loans and more reasonable terms on alternative lending.

By Maria Contreras-Sweet
Administrator, U.S. Small Business Administration

With apologies to baseball and your mother’s apple pie, nothing is more American than National Small Business Week.

Any true Southerner will tell you that, when it comes to cooking, it’s all about the heart. There’s no need for those fancy, highfalutin culinary degrees when you’ve got decades of tradition and a little splash of love in the kitchen. That down-home, fuzzy-warm style of baking is exactly what Catarah Coleman and Shoneji Robison brought with them from the South to the mean streets of urban Los Angeles.

A business is only as good as the employees who work there. In order to staff their business with the cream of the crop, Jill and Craig Treadway took a unique approach to their hiring process that has paid off in spades.

JT Engineering, an engineering consulting firm based in Hobart, WI, was established in 2005 by Jill Treadway, the principal owner, and specializes in design, construction and program management services at the local, state and federal level.

In today’s digital age, it’s nearly unheard of to not have some sort of online presence, especially for businesses that frequently utilize the Internet to market to their customer base and sell their product.  And yet, a vast 52% of small businesses do not have a website.

The best pieces of art are often transformative. What starts out as one thing can take on a new shape, meaning or purpose for someone else. It’s the out-of-box creativity and perception of an artist that can take one piece and make it something wholly different and unique – an artist like Olivia Ashjian James, for example.