For college entrepreneurs, juggling classes and work isn’t easy. Nor is figuring out what to do with your business after you graduate.
By RAYMUND FLANDEZ
September 25, 2006; Wall Street Journal Page R10
Lemuel Anaejionu started a successful business that buys and resells textbooks. Jennifer Woodsmall imports Vietnamese handbags and craft products. Josh Kowitt rents out minifridges and microwaves.
It’s amazing what you can do in college these days.
Undergraduates who start businesses are a growing bunch. Some, like the three above, are inspired more by their own ideas than what they learn in class. But soaring demand has led more than 300 four-year institutions to offer courses in entrepreneurship for non-business-school students, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo., group that focuses on youth development and advancing entrepreneurship. Also by Kauffman’s count, entrepreneurship departments on campus grew to 18 this year from seven in 1999, and more than 2,100 colleges and universities now offer at least one entrepreneurship course.
Nominations for the EO Global Student Entrepreneur Awards, meanwhile, which go to three top college entrepreneurs a year, jumped to 300 this year from 135 in 2005, says Erik MacKinnon, GSEA emerging programs facilitator.
“Honestly, these kids are willing to work themselves to death,” says Mr. MacKinnon. “They believe in the business that they’re running. They’re committed.”
Their stories don’t end after four years, either. Those who start a business while pursuing the equally tough job of earning an academic degree still have a daunting challenge ahead of them: keeping the business going after they graduate.
JL LANE
Ms. Woodsmall was a Wake Forest University sophomore studying in Southeast Asia when she fell in love with some handbags she saw in Vietnam.
This provided the seed for JL Lane, a business she started that imports and sells leather and suede handbags and other craft products made by women-run businesses in Vietnam. Ms. Woodsmall started the business in the spring of her junior year, back in Winston-Salem, N.C.
She found it tough balancing the business and her two majors, psychology and religion. Late at night, after studying, she’d work on new handbag designs or communicate by email with her Vietnamese suppliers. During the day, between classes, she took samples of the bags to upscale boutiques around Winston-Salem.
Because she wasn’t in the business school, she was at first not allowed to take Wake Forest business classes. Getting the business going would have been easier, she says, “had there been more support on campus in terms of access” to mentors, strategy groups and professors. “Without that, it was really challenging,” she says.
Not giving up, however, she took an online accounting course from nearby Greensboro College and started learning from the Small Business Administration Web site.
Particularly difficult, she says, was trying to learn by trial and error how to register her business, communicate with the Vietnamese and understand different tax laws.
Her situation improved, though. The next summer, she attended an entrepreneurship class at the London School of Economics, and in the fall of her senior year she persuaded Wake Forest to let her take a marketing class. By that time, the Kauffman Foundation was working with Wake Forest to build an entrepreneurship center there.
The center would come too late for Ms. Woodsmall to benefit. But with more cooperation from the administration, she got more support from the business school, and JL Lane started growing. After graduating in 2004, she tried to manage her company and work full time for a health-care research firm in Washington. But it was too much of a struggle, she says, without the help and structure she had gotten used to in her last year at Wake Forest. So she quit her job and devoted herself full time to JL Lane, with her mother, Linda Woodsmall, as her partner.
The Washington-based business is doing well. She sells her bags at retail for $80 to $200, and hopes to reach $150,000 in revenue this year, up from an estimated $50,000 in 2005. Until recently, she and her mother were the only employees, but Ms. Woodsmall says they are beginning to work with sales reps. Ms. Woodsmall also says that she plans to give 15% of her revenue each year to help start other women-run businesses in Vietnam and India.
Sometimes, she has to remind herself to stop focusing too much on day-to-day details and spend more time on strategy. “I think it’s a challenge,” she says, “to define those next steps and to choose one course over another.”
–Mr. Flandez is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York.