Our community is comprised of some absolutely brilliant entrepreneurs and so we asked a few of them to tell us the story of how they came up with the ideas for their business.
Hannah Knock | Advanced Clinician in Nutrition Response Testing | Certified Emotion Code Practitioner
I’m no stranger to owning my own business, having run two of them previously. I love the independence and flexibility that working for myself offers. When I had emergency gallbladder surgery in 2016, I was put on an abrupt track to healing my own body, re-learning what health actually meant, and what I had to do to attain it. Through nutritional detoxing, I was able to find my personality again after my second round of postpartum depression, and free up enough energy to find the motivation to keep going, learning, and improving. As much as a personalized nutritional program changed my life and the lives of my kids, then 5 and 2 years old, there was still a missing piece of the puzzle. I first found the Emotion Code modality when my son and I started going to counseling to work on our emotional connection. Watching the counselor release trapped emotional baggage in my son, and then witness an absolute change almost overnight in his behavior, I was hooked. I scheduled a session for myself, and saw immediate physical changes in my health also. I knew I was being shown the path towards being able to offer this life changing technique for others. Read more>>
Nicole Heylmun | Business Coach for Wedding Professionals
I’ve always known I wanted to be an entrepreneur and start my own business, and the itch started to grow stronger at the beginning of 2020. However, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do and had been chatting with a friend who had started her own business as a business coach to help me figure out my direction. That friend (I think she knew what she was doing), had asked me if I would meet up with another one of her friends to give her some advice on her wedding photography business. She knew about my 5+ years of experience in the wedding industry. I was a sales rep for WeddingWire, where I worked with countless wedding professionals, consulting on their business needs, and she thought I might be able to provide some good advice. So, I met up with this mutual friend over a cocktail, and she started asking me business questions. Every single question she asked was something I could help her with with my eyes closed, and I absolutely loved helping her. I came away from that meeting thinking “I could help people with their wedding businesses as my business!” Fast forward a few weeks, and I was laid off from my corporate sales job. Read more>>
Tim Osbourn | Teacher, Photographer, Artist, Father of 3
My business really started by accident. The story is actually quite funny. It all started back in the spring of 2016 and I told my wife I wanted to buy a drone to take photos. Turns out the nice ones were really expensive and being a teacher made it really tough to justify buying a $1500 “toy”. I had settled on buying a less expensive drone with my tax return to ‘follow my daughter around with”. Then came March Madness, my favorite sporting event of the year. This year was different as I decided to place a few bets on some games. Turns out luck was in my favor and I won over $1000. So obviously I was going to buy the nicer drone and $1500 later I was following my daughter around. A few days later, my wife messaged me and said, “Hey! I saw a friend of mine using your exact drone to take photos for a real estate”. I immediately messaged my realtor friend and asked him if there was a market for it. He had me flying that night! Anyway, turns out I was a decent photographer so I took some amazing photos around Colorado, CU campus, Coors Field, Breckinridge, etc. People were interested in my prints, but they looked so much better in large panoramas. Read more>>
Rebecca Dollard | Mom Mentor and Life Coach
The idea for my business started with a longing and pain in my own life. It started long before I ever considered starting a business. I was a young new mom and I was deeply struggling. Not just with motherhood but LIFE. I could get allll the expert advice I wanted (and even a lot I didn’t want) on how to parent my daughter. How to feed her, how to get her to sleep and grow and be healthy. But then I started to lean into and learn how to help her become emotionally, mentally, and socially healthy. I realized that I lacked many of those things myself. How could I give her something I didn’t have? I started to see that while there was support and experts for parenting- there was a gap in the fact that so many parents ourselves were struggling. Mothers are the gateway to health. So if we want the kids and the family to be healthy- we have to start with the mother. As I healed, I was able to show up in better healthier ways. The more I got support and learned healthy tools for myself- the more I had to give not only to parenting, but my marriage, and my communities. Read more>>
Connor Thompson | Owner / Partner
We saw a need in the market for a b2b service that would link grows, processors, and stores together across the state. During this time there were only individuals doing this and no structured services with multiple representatives to be able to market products. With this current structure the space lacked organization and reliability. There was also no accountability since the current structure was only made up of individuals. With the current structure we saw an opportunity to come in and create a team that people could depend on for all of their wholesale needs. With the team of four sales representatives we now had the ability to divide and cover the entire state. This allowed us to bring products from the western slope to the Denver area and visa versa. Read more>>
Carrie Horn | Principal at Bold Story Marketing, Brand Superpower Finder
When I came up with the idea for Bold Story, I was on a run in my neighborhood, and it was a run where I was feeling really fast, very strong. In the back of my mind, on many runs leading up to this one, there was kind of this subconscious question on my mind that I couldn’t answer. What was the next step in my career? If I’m being totally honest, maybe it was a question that I had been asking myself for several years. At the time, I was the senior marketing director for 5280 Magazine. I loved many things about the job, but the hardest part to leave was the culture, the incredible people I worked with there. When we entered into lockdown due to the pandemic in March of 2020, and the office was sent home to work remotely, I realized something. I always thought I would hate working from home and that I would feel very isolated. But I didn’t, I don’t! I love the freedom of the schedule and the ability to focus. I can still collaborate, I can still grab a coffee and I can still have those social moments I crave, but I can really get some good work done! So anyway, I was on this run, this amazing run. Read more>>
Heidi Finn | Broker, Principal
The start of our journey began in the fall of 2009. On the way to meet Michelle Ludt, my business partner, at a coffee shop, I received a text from a friend that JetBlue Airlines announced a killer promotion called “All You Can Jet.” $599 for 45 days of unlimited flights anywhere JetBlue flies. I sat down at the table and read the text out loud. “Want to do it?” She didn’t hesitate. “Hell ya!” “Are you sure? That means taking over a month off of work. I have three houses under contract.” “We’ll figure it out. We always do.” “O.k.” I said, hitting the ‘purchase’ button. The promotion sold out within the hour. *** We often reminisce of the early days, sitting in countless airport lounges asking each other “Where to next?” Blending travel and real estate into a manageable, successful and fulfilling lifestyle is an art. We spent countless sun soaked days on the beaches of Australia, Croatia, Dubai, Rio, Tonga, Europe, Mexico brainstorming how we could better juggle the two. And what we realized is it takes whole lot of support to balance a successful real estate career and life/passions/travel/family. Read more>>
Verity Noble
The average American produces 1,704 pounds of trash each year. That’s enough to fill 23 million garbage trucks, which is 50 garbage trucks per minute! Yes, you heard right. 50 GARBAGE TRUCKS PER MINUTE! And before we pat ourselves on the back for our awesome recycling habits here in Colorado, only 12% of our waste gets recycled, which is well under the national average of 35%. I began to feel totally powerless against the ever growing tsunami of plastic. It has become a seemingly inevitable part of life unless you have the time and energy to schlep miles to go to a bulk store every 3 months, painstakingly find out where to recycle every aspect of your life or go without a lot of your favorite foods because they’re packaged in plastic. I did all these things and it was a pain! Ugh. I knew there had to be a solution. So I teamed up with a group of like-minded serial entrepreneurs from different walks of life with different skill sets. We’re all equally passionate about putting a stop to this crazy cycle of waste so decided to launch Nude Foods Market, a zero-waste grocery, prepared meals and household products delivery service based in Boulder, CO. Read more>>
Jillian Rothe | Mom. Engineer. Lactivist.
I’ve spent the last 15 years of my day job on planes (pre-covid, of course) so when my daughter was born in 2015, we had quite the learning curve if we wanted to breast feed. The two biggest hurdles were the logistics of the cooler and pump added to my luggage and then making sure my partner and nanny had everything they needed to manage the stash of milk back home. We lived in Singapore at the time so put our engineering background to good use figuring out how to cram a week’s worth of milk into our tiny tiny freezer. We made our first Freeze It Flats out of Daiso supplies and then prototyped a few more for friends. I had enough requests from friends for freezer help and Q&A about travelling, that we eventually set up a website and made things a little more “official.” After getting everything in order to protect a patent, we officially launched in 2018 and it’s been really surreal to watch our little Japanese dollar store contraption morph into a real thing to help so many parents navigate travel and save more space in their freezers. Read more>>
Len Williams | Call Center Service Rep / Radio DJ
It wasn’t really about starting a business. Rather, sharing an experience with others regarding a love of music – in particular, “old school” music (70’s and 80’s R&B). I’ve done many different formats on air during my tenure, so to have the ability to play music that appeals to my actual demographic is the ultimate benefit. The potential to turn what I love into a business venture is icing on the cake for me. Read more>>