Entrepreneurs Women

A slim cardboard box is to arrive at Oprah Winfrey's studios this week, bearing perhaps the year's most intriguing reading for the nation's most influential reader. For all the writers dreaming of ways to get their work in front of Winfrey, these are pages she solicited. They are, of all things, a bunch of unpublished term papers by a group of history students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It was business unusual as the five young women from Future Image, a toy-manufacturing start-up, practiced how to present their business plan to potential investors. Barefoot, with metallic stars stuck to her temples, marketing manager Alexa Lundahl did cartwheels while Daniella Klopocki performed pirouettes and Franchesca Hladik sang. If not entirely professional, at least their behavior was understandable. They are, after all, only 13 years old.

Wealthy women business owners are more likely than their male counterparts to give at least $10,000 annually to charity. They're also more likely to participate in leadership roles when they volunteer for charitable organizations. Those are just some of the findings from a just-released survey conducted by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners examining the philanthropic behavior of entrepreneurs.

Culinary expert and local restaurant owner Zov has been recognized by two prestigious national groups: the Roundtable for Women in Foodservice and the National Assn. of Women Business Owners. Zov, owner of Zov's Bistro in Tustin, was one of five women nationally to be awarded the Roundtable for Women in Foodservice's Pacesetter Award based on accomplishments and contributions to the food service industry.

Their dream began with the soft, doughy mass of gorditas, deep-fried cornmeal stuffed with meat, and the spicy chile sauce of Maria Torres' famous enchiladas. Their determination took root during animated discussions in their cramped Boyle Heights apartments, where these women swapped stories of the forces beating down their Eastside barrio. The community, they concluded, needed to be fed--and so did they.

Three years after she struggled to start her own Spanish-language magazine, Silvia Ichar wishes she knew then what she learned in just four hours on Saturday. Ichar was one of about 100 small-business owners who attended the first business-finance forum held by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Orange County in Santa Ana. "I'm pleased to see so many people coming here for the information I should have gotten three years ago," she said.

Maria de Lourdes Sobrino began her entrepreneurial journey alone in a cramped storefront, whipping up 300 cups of ready-to-eat gelatin by hand each day. She knew nothing about food processing, had no friends in business or banking, and faced ridicule from her well-heeled family members, who urged her to come home to Mexico City. Sixteen years later, her Huntington Beach business and a sister company that makes frozen-fruit bars pull in $8 million a year.

Ever notice how the phrases "running a business" and "running a household" both involve the verb "running"? Not "walking" and definitely not "sitting around relaxing." Ever wonder how some women manage to do both the business thing and the family thing? So did the folks at Intuit Inc., the Mountain View, Calif., software company responsible for such basic business programs as Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax.

A family business. An unexpected death. No succession plan. It's a patented script among family-owned firms and one that Margo Groger was living after the short illness and death of her husband, Julian, in 1985. The junior high school counselor knew virtually nothing about the spa fittings operation her husband had founded about a decade earlier. Sale or liquidation of the business was an obvious next step.

Andrea Hove had a good job and bright future as a sales account representative at Canon USA. She's traded it all in for a piece of cake--literally. Hove, along with her mother and aunt, has opened a new Creative Cakery franchise in Brea. The store sells specialty bundt-shaped cakes that come in seven flavors and any number of funky designs. "I was very happy at Canon, but wanted to do something more creative," she said.