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Open for business
Bethel alumni parlay their liberal arts education into entrepreneurial enterprises
by Melanie Zuercher
“Entering the business world” may be synonymous with starting the climb up the corporate ladder – but not always.
“A lot of [college] business programs send students into the large corporate world,” says Sharon Eicher, Bethel College associate professor of business and economics. “But generally that’s not our students. Many are from small towns and they are interested in going back there, to a family business or to start their own business.”
Eicher and Professor of Business and Economics Allison McFarland each teach half of a two-semester sequence on entrepreneurship and small business management. As relatively new faculty (Eicher began teaching at Bethel in 2005, McFarland in 2006), they continue to develop new ways of teaching established courses. But a look at a few Bethel alumni proves Eicher’s point.
Julie Miller, for example, came to Bethel in 2002, intending to continue working for her father, Jim Miller, owner of Jim’s Appliances in Inman, once she finished her degree. “I grew up in my dad’s business,” Julie says. “I scheduled service calls, sold kitchen appliances, ordered parts and went to service schools with the guys.”
But Julie also nurtured her creative side at Bethel. She majored in art – her preferred medium is small metals, particularly for jewelry – with a focus on graphic design. “When I graduated from Bethel [in 2005] and began looking for a job as a graphic designer, I knew I’d have to work a lot of hours for someone else without much return,” she says. “Maybe my time and energy would be better spent on starting my own business.
“I had been thinking about doing that for a long time,” she continues. “I had even considered opening a little bead shop in Inman but knew it would be hard work to get [enough traffic].”
In April 2006, Julie opened The Newton Beadery at 605 North Main in downtown Newton. Along with her inventory of beads and jewelry-making supplies, she had a small selection of yarn, but customer demand quickly caused her to expand her offerings of yarn and needles. In fact, the business has been so successful that it will soon be moving a few doors north in the 600 block of Main into a larger storefront.
Grant Unrau ’83 also grew up with family-owned businesses. “My parents were always doing their own thing,” he says. “First they had a little store in my hometown, Martinsville, Sask. I was pumping gas and stocking shelves almost before I could reach them. Then they bought an insurance company. Then it was gravel trucks. Never anything big, but enough to make a living. Dad [Gordon] would have the idea and then he’d shuffle it off to Mom [Phyllis].”
Grant came to Bethel because of his music teacher and mentor at Rosthern (Sask.) Junior College, Marv Regier ’71. Grant majored in fine arts at Bethel – music, art and drama, with his chosen emphasis in graphic design. After he and Peabody native Janelle Stucky ’84 married and moved to Wichita, Grant went to work for Sharpline, an industrial design company with clients such as Bell Helmets and Winnebago recreational vehicles.
Then, “I traded a Go-Kart and a motorcycle for a tiny T-shirt shop that a guy was running out of his garage,” Grant says. “Our whole house became a drying rack. Eventually a neighbor woman became my first employee.” That was Imperial Graphics.
Janelle, meanwhile, who had majored in music and German at Bethel, got a secretarial job at Towne West Square in Wichita. “[Simon Property Group, owners of the mall] kept trying to get me to go into the management training program,” she says. “But I didn’t want to leave Kansas – who would change my oil [if not Dad]?”
Eventually, however, Janelle agreed to go to McAllen, Texas, as director of marketing for one of the top revenue-producing shopping centers in the United States. Grant sold Imperial Graphics and – “with a little more thought and planning this time” – founded The Graphics Solution. Again, home base was literally home, “until we got to six employees and were busting the seams of the house, so we moved into a rented office space.”
Grant “grew the business nationally and internationally” for several years. Janelle was promoted to regional marketing director in 1996, supervising marketing for 12 shopping centers from Simon’s Austin, Texas, office. In 2000, she was promoted again, to vice president of integrated marketing services. Now based in New York, she supervised marketing for 60 shopping centers as well as corporate projects such as public relations for all 175 Simon shopping centers. At that point, The Graphics Solution, now called Persidea, had 50 employees, sign-making facilities and print shops, and Grant began working to transition out of ownership. That took until about 2003, at which time Grant and Janelle both made a major life switch.
From May 2003 until December 2005 – with occasional breaks in Saskatchewan or Kansas – the pair traveled in Africa, Central and South America and Europe. When they finally decided in January 2006 to stay put in North America for a while, they founded Stun Marketing, a collective composed of members in Austin, Miami, Washington, D.C., New York and Saskatoon, that does design and marketing projects and consulting for a variety of clients.
Lynda (Waltner) Stucky ’82, the owner of ClearlySpeaking in Moon Township, Pa., a Pittsburgh suburb, came to Bethel from Freeman, S.D. She spent two years studying “liberal arts, not really knowing what I wanted to do.” She volunteered at an orphanage in Reynosa, N.M., and worked as a nurses’ aide at Axtell Hospital in Newton (now merged into Newton Medical Center) before following her interest in general science and going to the University of Kansas to complete her bachelor’s degree and earn a master’s degree, both in speech pathology.
For a number of years, Lynda worked as a speech pathologist in a fairly traditional hospital setting. When her husband, Max Stucky ’77, was transferred with his job at Bayer from Kansas City to Pittsburgh in 1994, Lynda opted to take some time off. When she decided to go back to work in 2000, “the profession [of speech pathology] had changed dramatically. The emphasis was on swallowing, working with stroke patients who have so much trouble with that.”
She didn’t enjoy her work as much as she once had. Then she took a one-day seminar on corporate speech pathology and loved it, she says. Corporate speech pathology works at helping executives trying to advance in their profession “to speak more clearly and with more impact,” Lynda says.
Often, that involves people who are native speakers of languages other than English, but sometimes it means dealing with “Pittsburghese,” she says, which “sounds uneducated, with some words that aren’t even in the English language.” Corporate speech issues include accent modification, diction, rate of speech, expressive intonation and “getting rid of bad speech habits, such as ‘um,’” Lynda says.
She founded ClearlySpeaking in 2002 and is currently in the process of putting some of her services online, hoping to launch the internet component in January 2008.
Although none of these present-day entrepreneurs majored in business at Bethel, they all point to aspects of their Bethel education that contributed to their career paths.
For Lynda Stucky, the contributions were concrete, practical ones. “I did an interterm class at Cooper School in Newton, working with hearing impaired and deaf children,” she remembers. “That’s where I was first introduced to speech pathology. Later, working at Axtell, I saw that you could do speech pathology in a hospital setting.”
“I had a pretty hefty workload at Bethel,” Julie Miller says. “The professors expect a lot, so you learn to juggle and prioritize, to figure out what you can and can’t put off. That’s certainly what it’s like running a business – there is always more work than you can possibly get done in a day.”
She credits Bethel with fostering the social responsibility she tries to maintain in the business by taking care where she buys yarn, beads and supplies. “We try to buy fairly traded beads, and yarns made in the United States where possible,” she says. “We get one kind of yarn from a Uruguayan women’s cooperative and a certain kind of needles from a cooperative in Vietnam.”
She also took a value for customer service from her experience at Bethel, she says. “We want people to have a quality product,” she says, “and to know how to do things right. We are committed to supporting the community, which is also something I learned at Bethel.”
Grant and Janelle Unrau agree that the college years were formative for them. “You spend a lot of time when you’re in college figuring out how you want to live and how to make the world a better place,” Grant says.
“Right after college, there are loans to pay off,” Janelle says. “But as time goes on, you’re more able to think about how you’re affecting the world. After my time in the corporate world, where I’ve been successful, I have a drive now to do things better, to return to my college values.”
Like Julie, the Unraus want their business to make a positive impact on the world. “Traveling makes the world seem smaller,” Grant says, and because of that, Stun Marketing looks for clients that practice social and environmental responsibility.
And like Lynda, Grant sees the practical side of his Bethel education. “I became a graphic designer of some repute, with very little formal education [in graphic design],” he says. “It was the other liberal arts stuff – learning how to learn – that sent me into the world with what I needed.”
Today’s budding Bethel entrepreneurs should also be assured of this: All four of these people love what they do. “I really like not working for someone else. The flexibility is great,” Lynda says. “I can spend time with my kids and take vacations when it works best for me.” Son Ben is now a freshman at Bethel but Abraham and Sam are still at home.
Grant is a true entrepreneur, Janelle says. “I’m likely to look at something and say, ‘That wouldn’t work.’ Grant would say, ‘Why not?’ He’s always seeing the possibilities.” Besides, she adds, “he’s a terrible employee – he’s not an order taker.” “But I’m a good boss,” Grant says, and Janelle heartily concurs.
“To me, it’s not so much about the dollars earned as loving what I do,” Julie says. “I feel like I’m cheating – like I get up every day and go to work to play. It doesn’t feel like a job.”