Meet Elise
It is story time. Every Friday I will tell another piece of a growing story centered around one or more fictional young entrepreneurs. Throughout the story we will watch every minute step of our protagonist’s journey, examining the necessary choices made in the founding of a small business and how those choices are made.
Allow me to introduce Elise. Elise is nineteen years old and a part-time student in a local community college, studying nothing in particular. She holds down a full-time job at the coffee shop across the way from her college, and lives with a few friends in an overcrowded apartment.
Elise is energetic, intelligent and just slightly restless. While her friends seem happy to continue their faintly high-school lifestyle, Elise thinks that she can and should be doing more. After dabbling in community charity work, volunteering in local politics, and a brief stint of obsessive online computer gaming, Elise determines that her excess energy might best be invested in starting up a business of her own.
No overwhelming drive exists in Elise’s life. She has not dreamed of designing fashionable clothing since she was eleven years old. She has not spent years at a keyboard hacking away at C++ code for sheer love of The Puzzle. She did not spend an impressionable childhood at some grandmother’s knee watching ceramic pottery be cast. In other words, Elise does not know what business she wants to start she simply wants to start a business.
Somewhere Elise read that the secret to starting a business boiled down to: “find a need, fill a need”. She is pretty sure she read that somewhere…or maybe saw it in a movie…or maybe it was from that CG cartoon with the robots…anyway, it seemed like common sense advice, so Elise set out to find a need that she could fill.
For many weeks, no idea came to her. In fact Elise was rapidly losing interest in the whole entrepreneur idea. Then, one night, while hanging out with her friends at a dance club, someone said: “This town really needs a swap store. Your only choices for clothes around here are J.C. Penny or mining for gold at Goodwill.”
Elise’s eyes lit up. Upon reflection she realized that she had had that very same thought a dozen times in the past month, but never connected it to errant quest for business ideas. Though no student of the haute couture, and entirely uninterested in designing runway fashion, Elise was a sort of a local fashion guru. She had developed a wide store of traded and saved clothes. Through a combination of her limited sewing skills, imagination, and more than a few insomniac nights, Elise was already a visible persona in the local counter-cultural fashion scene…maybe, just maybe, she had what it took to turn that into a business.
As soon as the night started to wind down, Elise sought out the friend who had voiced the original complaint and suggested they go to the local Denney’s for a cup of coffee and a conversation. Elise laid out her idea for starting a used but fashionable clothes store in the area, and her friend loved the idea. They talked for hours about why they thought it might or might not work.
The city they lived in was small, but only a short drive from a major city. Not quite a suburb, their city none-the-less lacked any major distinguishing industry. The community college, however, was growing. Over the past few years the collage had won a few awards and expanded its faculty and facilities to support over 14,000 students (from a previous student body of 6,000 just three years before). This meant that there was large and growing student-aged demographic in the area that lacked the coincident retail and service industry. Because it was a community college, not a university, the major chain stores (Gap, Hot Topic, etc.) did not seem to have noticed or responded to the change.
There was a need. It had not been filled. Elise could fill it.
Next Friday Elise faces the inevitable question: “Now what?”
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