Beka Doolittle

“Between my husband and sons, I had all of these boys in the house, and I was the only girl,” she said. “I realized I needed girly stuff. So I started incorporating pink into my life in little ways.”

The trigger for the start of the business, however, wasn’t such a cute story. Both Beka and her husband, Brad, lost their jobs in 2009 in the economic downtown.

It was time to put in motion her plans for a business selling pink items through an online storefront.

In September 2011, Doolittle launched ThePinkStore.com, a limited liability corporation aimed at a broadly defined market – anyone who likes pink.

“I had no idea what I was doing!” she recalled. ”I had never been a business owner. I just knew I was going to sell pink stuff, and it was going to be great. I needed products, but I hadn’t even gotten that far.”

Since the launch, ThePinkStore.com has steadily grown, especially as more clothing and accessories have been added. Doolittle said she had great Christmas sales with holiday shoppers – mainly mothers – picking pink for Christmas. She marketed heavily this year for Mother’s Day to capture sales.

“Christmas was a game-changer for my business. Mothers were buying for their kids and themselves.”

Work-life Balance

Keeping the website running and updated doesn’t cost Doolittle a lot of money, but it does cost a lot of time – meeting with vendors, working on the back end of the website, updating products and managing continual emails and phone calls.

Today, about 30 wholesalers have their products featured on ThePinkStore.com. Most of the time, the wholesalers handle the shipping. The rest of the products are shipped from Doolittle’s home, with coupons and promotional flyers included to trigger more sales.

It can be tough, Doolittle says, to be a “mompreneur,” balancing the considerable demands of running a startup business with raising a young family in the family’s Elkhorn home.

“I’m a mom with kids. When you look at male business owners, they don’t necessarily have those challenges,” she explained.

The tricky part, she said, is that when you first start a business, you say “yes” to everyone and everything because you are so excited and passionate about achieving success. Eventually, she said, you have to start saying “no” to some things to make more time for family activities. Doolittle said she has had to cut back on the hours spent on her business, making more time for family, sleep and fitness.

Resources for Success

Doolittle turned to trusted entrepreneurial organizations to provide the education and support she needed to launch and operate ThePinkStore.com.

She found business volunteers at the Greater Omaha SCORE Chapter to be a tremendous resource for education and knowledge for getting her business started. She also relied on the Metro Omaha Business Center, which awarded her a $1,000 business grant in 2012.  And she built her networks and learned many business strategies from the Nebraska Chapter of the Small Business Association.

Her advice to other moms starting a home-based business? Patience.

“The journey is learning that everything about the business and family are important,” she said. “It’s fun. I don’t want to miss any of it.”

The seminar is particularly timely as many small business owners use the spring and summer to seek financing to expand and create jobs, and entrepreneurs take steps to create a new business. An important source of financing for entrepreneurs is the SBA guaranteed loan program. The SBA provides short- and long-term guaranteed loans to eligible, credit-worthy start-ups and existing small businesses that cannot obtain financing on reasonable terms through normal lending channels. SBA provides a number of loan programs for most small business needs.

During the seminar, a representative from the SBA will explain the importance of a strong business plan, how the SBA’s resource partners — SCORE and the Nebraska Business Development Center — can help, and why lenders use SBA guaranteed loans in their financing projects.

Over the past six months, the SBA, working with commercial lender partners, approved 186 loans worth a total of $61.2 million for small businesses across the state, a rate that closely matches the previous pre-recessionary participation rate. In a continuing sign of confidence in Nebraska’s entrepreneurial economy, 45 percent of SBA loan approvals in the first half of the fiscal year went to fund new businesses; nationwide, that figure normally is between 33 and 40 percent.

As a direct result of SBA-guaranteed small business financing throughout the state over the past six months, more than 800 new jobs are being created in Nebraska, and more than 1,400 jobs are being kept on payrolls.

Haider, a biomedical engineer and professor of orthopedic surgery research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, thought hip and knee replacement surgeries could be better.

The problem: A successful joint replacement requires a talented surgeon with a mastery of skills gained through countless hours of experience and repetition. Success also requires a complement of specialized nurses, staff and costly equipment. It’s been that way for decades.

Haider, a mechanical engineer who spent the first half of his career in fluid dynamics, saw a unique solution to the problem—one that has the potential to transform how joint replacement surgeries are performed in the future.

“I changed careers late,” he said, “and when you come in with fresh eyes, you can think outside the box a little.”

But a great idea—even one as promising as Haider’s—gets nowhere without some help. It would need an infusion of fresh capital, and a savvy entrepreneur nimble enough in the biomedical industry to build an entire business around the new technology.

All those elements came together for Haider, and the result is Trak Surgical Inc., a new Omaha-based surgical device company with enough Invest Nebraska funding to create as many as seven high-skill, high-paying biomedical jobs.

“This company is a fantastic example of the university, private enterprise and government working together to create high-growth companies and jobs in Nebraska,” said Michael Dixon, president and CEO of UNeMed Corp., the technology transfer arm of UNMC.

UNeMed entered the picture early in the process. It helped file the patent applications, and worked with Haider through a nine-year process of testing, fund-hunting and match-making—a process that is still months, if not years, from impacting patients.

Bruce Lichorowic, a serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley who has been building and guiding startup companies for more than 30 years, formed Trak Surgical Inc. in 2012. Lichorowic, who has raised more than $600 million in venture capital enterprises, signed on as Trak Surgical’s CEO and quickly lined up angel investors in California, Texas and Arizona.

Invest Nebraska, a venture development organization that seeks out technology and high-growth Nebraska entrepreneurs, effectively rooted the new company to Omaha with a recent $500,000 matching capital investment.

Invest Nebraska CEO Mark Crawford said one of the biggest factors in the decision to invest in the new startup was the addition of Licorowic.

“I bet on the jockey, not the horse,” he said. “The cherry on top is the innovative technology.”

Invest Nebraska is partially funded by the state’s Talent and Innovation Initiative, a funding program in the Nebraska Department of Economic Development aimed at encouraging small businesses, innovation and entrepreneurship in Nebraska.

“The technology was invented here. The research and development stays here,” Crawford said. “My hope is future deals can be funded completely inside the state.”

The Peter Kiewit award recognizes University of Nebraska students who have directed their energies, ideas and talents toward community and business improvements with the creative and innovative use of information technology. The award is accompanied by a $2,500 prize.

This year’s Kiewit award winners are Robert LaMagna-Reiter, Felix Burgstaller and Manas Bharadwaj, master’s students at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who together have developed a business plan for a startup called STEM-Direct. The enterprise will provide affordable online tutoring to high school and college students in science, technology, engineering and math – fields that are widely acknowledged to be building blocks of a competitive economy.

STEM-Direct founders Robert LaMagna-Reiter, Felix Burgstaller and Manas Bharadwaj

STEM-Direct will offer tutoring services made possible through partnerships with schools, universities and business. Partners will be based primarily in Omaha although the students’ business plan can be scaled nationally.

According to the students’ business plan: “With the increasing use of technology in different areas of business across industries, there is an unparalleled demand for professionals with skills in STEM areas.” A report issued by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology concluded that the United States need to produce 1 million more STEM graduates than its current rate.

Yet despite this high demand, U.S. students do not compare favorably against students in other countries on STEM assessment tests. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that many students cannot afford expensive tutoring to supplement their coursework. STEM-Direct will provide quality tutoring at an affordable cost so that more students can be prepared for college and career success.

“One of the most important things the University of Nebraska can do to ensure a competitive, vibrant economy is nurture the entrepreneurial spirit of our students,” Milliken said. “The team behind STEM-Direct provides an excellent example of how students can leverage their University of Nebraska education into a product that will serve people in the state and grow the economy. I commend these students for identifying a real need in the market and thinking of a creative way to meet it.”

The Walter Scott award is designed to encourage existing businesses with a presence in Nebraska to create partnerships with the University of Nebraska in the area of technology. The award comes with a $10,000 prize to be used for the promotion and/or creation of student work experiences in the fields of information science, technology and engineering.

This year’s Scott award winner is Hudl, a Lincoln-based company that provides video analysis tools to college, high school and professional sports teams. The company serves more than 11,000 high schools, 2,000 youth teams, 800 colleges, 10 NFL teams, eight NHL teams and one NBA team.

Hudl was founded by John Wirtz, Brian Kaiser and David Graff, all three of whom graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management. The students participated in the Raikes School’s “Design Studio” program, where students apply their software and business skills to solve a real-world problem. Through the program, the students realized that the sharing of videos of athletic practices and games could be a valuable training tool for sports teams – and the idea for Hudl was born.

Today Hudl employs about 80 people, most of whom are UNL graduates. Five to 10 UNL students intern at Hudl each year and many are hired as full-time employees when they graduate. Hudl employees speak to classes at the university and are involved in advising aspiring entrepreneurs, judging entrepreneurship competitions and serving on UNL alumni boards – serving as role models to students who dream of starting their own company someday.

Hudl intends to use its award money to support its ongoing partnership with the university, perhaps by expanding internship opportunities or sponsoring Design Studio projects at the Raikes School.

“Hudl is one of the most exciting success stories of student entrepreneurship in recent memory,” Milliken said. “These students – combining their creativity and drive, University of Nebraska education, and entrepreneurial spirit – identified a solution to a real-world challenge and brought it to the marketplace. The response has been tremendous. I could not be more proud of their success – or more appreciative of their continued partnership with the University of Nebraska. The community leadership, mentorship and engagement demonstrated by Hudl employees means we’ll be celebrating more success stories like theirs in the future – a great thing for Nebraska’s innovation economy.”

Both STEM-Direct and Hudl will be honored at a luncheon in May.

Pankonin said she saw a need for such an organization after attending various start-up events. At these events she often ran into Jill Thayer, who would eventually become co-founder of Ladies Who Launch.

“We noticed that usually she and I (Jill) were the only females in the room at start-up events,” Pankonin said. “Jill and I bonded almost immediately and felt like it was up to us to build a community among female entrepreneurs in Lincoln.”

Thayer said she thought they’d have a hard time finding participants, but that hasn’t been the case. About 40 people attended the first meeting of Ladies Who Launch, when Thayer was only expecting 12.

“We’ve been really pleasantly surprised by the turnout,” Thayer said. “We’re hearing from people that they’re hearing about it from a lot of different people. It’s really just word of mouth. Even guys in the start-up community have joined the Facebook page so they can pass it on to other women they know.”

The group meets every other Tuesday at Brewsky’s in the Haymarket.

“It’s a networking group with no fee to join and no requirement to come every time,” Thayer said. “We try to be flexible about it. A lot of people have told us that they really like that.”

All kinds of women and business ideas are welcome, Thayer said, whether their interest is focused around software, printing, jewelry or any other topic.

Pankonin encourages women to start talking about their start-up ideas, even if they’re nervous or unsure of a business plan.

“Some are intimated or some are simply afraid to share, thinking somebody will steal it,” Pankonin said. “Guess what? If you’re not building it, somebody else is. Start telling other people and listen to feedback.”

Similarly, Thayer advises women with solid business ideas to just take the plunge.

“Just jump in and do it,” Thayer said. “One of the women who’s been coming every time said that she’s opening up a storefront. She said that just meeting with these women was really the kick in the pants that she needed. Now, she’s starting her business on April 1. Just get out there and try it.”

For more information on Ladies Who Launch, visit the group’s Facebook page at Facebook.com/ladieswholaunchlincoln.

Every Cornhusker fan knows what this means: It’s Game Day.

Now, Husker Nation has a new way of connecting with their favorite athletic program – Hail Varsity magazine.

Hail Varsity magazine launched in 2012

Featuring intriguing stories and impeccable photography, Hail Varsity is owned and published by Aaron Babcock. The magazine is focused primarily on football, but also covers other Husker athletics, history and interest pieces.

Babcock, who has years of experience in publication work, media, public relations and freelancing – including working for the New York Yankees and a six-year stint as the general manager of Huskers Illustrated – was uniquely suited to get Hail Varsity off to a successful start.

“At about this point last year, I made an offer to purchase the magazine (Huskers Illustrated) from the company that owned it,” Babcock said. “When that didn’t work out, I decided to go ahead and launch Hail Varsity.

“Ultimately I was working 80- to 100-hour weeks for a company that was a good company to work for, but I was putting a lot of hours in for somebody else,” Babcock said. “I decided that at some point, if that was ever going to change long-term, I needed to either be doing something different, or be working for myself, and I really liked what I was doing.”

In building and launching Hail Varsity, the key component for Babcock was building a strong team around him that not only shared his vision for the magazine, but also strived for top-quality work.

“We were fortunate that a guy named Mike Babcock, (no relation to Aaron Babcock) who had been the editor at Huskers Illustrated for about 17 years, decided to come with me,” Babcock said. “This gave us instant creditability, and someone that I was used to working with.”

This, along with the hiring of two other individuals, was key in the creation of Hail Varsity.

In addition to developing the perfect team, Babcock looked to a consultant to help his new company navigate early-stage challenges such as strategy definition and business planning.

“That was definitely helpful, but at some point it falls on the owner,” Babcock said. “You’ve to take responsibility for that point. I was able to transition out of the day-to-day portion of producing the magazine pretty quickly, and focus more on sales and business development.”

Aaron Babcock, Owner and Publisher of Hail Varsity

Hail Varsity is published 16 times per year — weekly during the football season and bi-monthly during the offseason. In conjunction with the magazine, Hail Varsity offers a website where readers can view high-quality photos of past Husker events, read the latest in Husker happenings in-between print periods, live-stream radio broadcasts, purchase Husker merchandise and sign up for the Hail Varsity newsletter.

Currently, Hail Varsity is predominately funded by Babcock and his wife, with the help of a few minority investors, who he points out are important learning tools for entrepreneurs.

“We learn every time we pitch, whether it’s how to present or how to shape the business message a little better,” Babcock said.

“Every investor usually comes in with some ideas, and I think the key when you pitch is to go in there and really try and learn as well,” Babcock said. “They can bring some valuable advice to the table as well, even if it’s not a business they have a lot of expertise in.”

Just like on the field at Memorial Stadium, or on the court at the Devaney Center, Babcock says success all comes back to teamwork.

“Its about the people you surround yourself with,” Babcock said. “You’ve got to have people that share your vision, but you’ve also got to have people that will challenge you to look outside of your original vision.

“You don’t want to be distracted by different ideas, but at the same time you want to be developing and looking at the best possible plan for your business, and its okay if that changes, as long as the core values stay true to what you had envisioned.”

Babcock will be speaking at the 2013 Intersect conference for Nebraska entrepreneurs. The event is April 12 in Omaha. For more information, visit www.intersectne.com.

For more information on Hail Varsity, visit www.hailvarsity.com.

“Our premise is we want to be the space for students of any major who have an idea in any field; students that want to build something and we want to help them build that,” said Sourabh Chakraborty, outreach coordinator of HIVE and a senior computer engineering major at UNL.

Students don’t necessarily need to have a specific idea to attend a HIVE workshop — they can simply to learn new skills and build on the skills they already have.

“The best ideas, the best products, are built when you bring people from very different skill sets to come together in one place and collaborate,” Chakraborty said. “At HIVE we feel strongly that the sum of our parts is far bigger than our individual skills.”

Sharing unique skills and building on unique ideas was the inspiration behind starting an organization such as HIVE.

HIVE is based on participation in workshops, where lectures are almost non-existent and “learning by doing” takes over.

Sourabh Chakraborty

“Reading a textbook is a different kind of learning than actually applying it because it’s a real-world way of learning. It’s solving real problems by building real solutions,” Chakraborty said.

Chakraborty added: “We realized students wanted to learn a lot of things that the colleges were not teaching. It’s hard for a course to teach everything such as concepts and apply them at the same time in a semester.”

HIVE strives to get students the information they need to become better professionals.

Chakraborty said that a lot of students graduate lacking certain skills they need for the job they want.

Students appreciate the organization for the opportunities it’s able to provide to UNL.

“HIVE is important because they are a group of truly driven and talented young individuals that help motivate and inspire students and student groups on campus,” said Taylor Thompson, a UNL senior majoring in sustainability in the built environment with entrepreneurial studies. “They are connecting unique groups of people to work together that would benefit greatly from the collaboration. They really understand the importance of collaboration now, on campus and for the future.”

Many students such as Thompson were eager to further their knowledge, but before HIVE the options for out-of-class extended learning were limited.

“The biggest gap we need to fill are students who are desperately trying to get this information right now,” Chakraborty said.

HIVE Workshop

Chakraborty said students who want to learn something have two options: pay to take a class outside of UNL, or go online — which may not yield immediate feedback.

HIVE participants are given opportunities to learn more about mobile apps, making games, creating marketing campaigns or building a start-up company.

“It could be an entrepreneur student who is not a graphic designer but wants to learn how to make logos, or possibly a graphic designer who wants to make logos,” Chakraborty said.

Even if the HIVE team isn’t able to help with something, they can connect the student with someone who does know.

HIVE workshops are generally 90 minutes long, but “bootcamps” that include bigger projects such as building a social networking platform similar to Facebook can take up eight hours.

“At HIVE we want to create a vibrant environment for people who just want to build things,” Chakraborty said.  “Only when you start building it, you realize this is not as easy as it seemed — but you feel the most empowered and understand more.”

Ninety percent of HIVE workshops require knowledge of computer use. The remaining 10 percent represent advanced-level skills, which can be learned in prior workshops.

If a student misses a workshop, he or she can contact one of the leaders of HIVE to get caught up.

Chakraborty said that instead of restricting HIVE interactive workshops to only UNL students, the organization has opened its doors to all people of the community.

“I feel that the spirit of entrepreneurship is the cure for a lot of maladies in a community,” Chakraborty said. “It empowers individuals to believe they can change the world by changing something to make it better no matter what field they are in.”

Janita Pavelka awarded the 2013 Nebraska Outstanding Entrepreneurship Educator award

Recipients of the award have made significant contributions toward the organization, implementation, development or evaluation of entrepreneurship education. The educator’s achievements may be from one or more of the following areas: classroom instruction, community-based learning, mentoring programs, internships, and/or student organization leadership. The award is co-sponsored by the Nebraska Enterprise Fund and the Nebraska Entrepreneurship Task Force (NETForce).

The award recognized Pavelka’s ongoing passion for teaching young people entrepreneurial skills. She developed the unique program Biz 4 Real Kids in September 2002. The mission of Biz 4 Real Kids is to raise entrepreneurs and lifelong learners. Pavelka has worked with young children to help them begin a business venture by the time they are 6 and supports them as they continue in their business endeavors.

She has taught hundreds of students how to become youth entrepreneurs through the Omaha Home School Learning Center, the Omaha Public Library, the YMCA of the Prairie, P-K Partnerships, Metro Community College, Central Community College and the Summer Honors Program of ESU#11. She has also been featured on PBS’ TV Biz Kids Show, and is the author of the book “Start Young, Start Small: The ABC’s and 123’s of Owning a Business by the Age of Six.” She developed the Phelps County Nebraska Youth Leadership Initiative focusing on youth leadership and social entrepreneurship.

Pavelka has also coordinated 24 businesses with her own children over the last 11 years and has served as a mentor for the youth-owned businesses that have developed through her efforts. She, her husband and their four children live in rural Holdrege on what she lovingly calls the “Old McDonald Farm” where they raise livestock.

The Nebraska Enterprise Fund is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) certified by the U.S. Department of Treasury CDFI Fund. NEF provides direct loans to start-up and existing micro/small businesses across Nebraska. NEF works collaboratively with lending organizations and banks to assist in filling financial gaps for businesses.

The Nebraska Entrepreneurship Task Force-NETForce is an actively engaged group of collaborating partners focused on the high-income, high-skill, and high-demand entrepreneurial career opportunities available to Nebraska’s youth and adults. Collaborating partners include the Nebraska Community College System, Nebraska Department of Education, nonprofit service providers and economic development organizations, private colleges and universities, and the University of Nebraska.

Teams will be given a real-world business challenge and will compete for cash prizes awarded to the top three solutions. Representatives of local technology companies will judge the solutions and award prizes. Food and soft drinks will also be provided.

“The challenge is a way for local companies to identify emerging IT talent, and to let these students know that there are countless job and internship opportunities right here in Lincoln,” said Dustin Clonch, co-founder of Agilx, a Lincoln software company and primary organizer of the challenge.

Jake McElroy, also a co-founder of Agilx, feels the challenge meets a community need. “It seems as though area students are sometimes not aware of the vibrant tech community in Lincoln, and the challenge delivers the message that they don’t need to head to Silicon Valley to find a rewarding technology career,” he said.

“Developing and keeping IT talent is a critical issue to drive continuous growth in Lincoln’s technology sector,” said Rod Armstrong, director of the AIM Institute’s Lincoln office. “The challenge is a great way to bring students and technology professionals together in an effort to grow the IT pipeline.”

The list of sponsoring companies and organizations continues to grow, and includes Agilx, Assurity, AIM, Invest Nebraska, Hudl, Vitru, Automated Systems, BinaryNet & Lamarz . Student and sponsorship registration is available at www.agilx.com.

According to Brian Ardinger, managing director of NMotion, the program was created when “we just began thinking. How do we accelerate start-ups in Nebraska? Especially those in the early stages and not necessarily connected to the community yet.” He says start-up accelerator programs are already popular in other cities and many of them served as starting blocks for NMotion.

“The goal is to build six to 10 teams of graduates each year to be leaders in the community and create a jumping point for their start-up companies to be successful,” Ardinger said. NMotion is currently accepting applications for the first year of the program. Ardinger said “the requirements are very broad, but we prefer that it’s a start-up in the beginning stages.” The focus of the program is around technology, but teams can apply with ideas ranging from agriculture to finances to health care. Companies already generating revenue and hoping to grow are also encouraged to apply.

The intense 12-week program will include hands-on educational curriculum tailored to the needs of each start-up. Teams will receive feedback from successful entrepreneurs and have access to training videos, panel discussions and field trips. Companies will also have the opportunity to work with lead mentors, who will spend about an hour a week with the company during the program. Ardinger said lead mentors essentially “adopt” a team and help them throughout the program by sharing experiences, contacts and insights. Companies are also exposed to ad-hoc mentors, who share their specific expertise with the participating companies. All mentors tailor their support toward the need of each team, but they focus on creating a business model, market strategy, branding, pricing and an investor pitch. In addition, companies will receive free co-working space and legal, research and marketing assistance. There is no cost to be a part of NMotion and selected teams will receive $15,000 in seed funding and up to $100,000 in free or reduced cost services.

The first session will begin in June and end with a Tunnel Walk Demo Day on Sept. 5, when teams can showcase their company’s alumni and investors to the public. Teams interested in applying can do so on the NMotion website. Applications are due April 15 and up to 10 teams will be selected after an interview process.