Casey Nickole’s entrepreneur journey began behind a salon chair in DERAILED in Dayton’s Oregon District.
A year later, she moved across the country, landed a job in a Seattle barbershop, and went on to launch her own salon, BANG, which she grew to multiple locations.
Today, she’s back home and launching a new adventure. SHAG Studios is an 11,000 square foot renovated medical center. Its 15 private studio spaces will house a variety of wellness entrepreneurs and retailers in one space.
“Honestly, I’m just that cliche person who moved home during the pandemic,” Casey recalled. “Seattle was very tumultuous at that time. Everything was boarded up. I came home and visited family and realized that I wanted to move back.”
She opened SHAG hair salon on Jefferson St. with a friend from Seattle before she found the building at 1126 S Main St.
“Our goal is to take each of those spaces and create a space that reflects the person who rents it. They can choose kind of colors or patterns or light fixtures or things that they feel like are going to enhance their business,” Casey said. “I think it’s important to give people spaces to reflect not only who they are in business, but who they are in the world. I really look forward to collaborating with people who want to spend their time in a space that feels good energetically and socially.”
Casey tapped the First Floor Fund to complete renovations.
“Dayton has a lot of these really great spaces that have been neglected for just a tiny bit too long. People are starting to inhabit those spaces and turn them over. I used the First Floor Fund through the city of Dayton, which was amazing. I definitely recommend anyone entrepreneurial who’s interested in being downtown or close to downtown, take advantage of that.”
The studios for rent at SHAG offer a great way for growing wellness practitioners to dip a toe into entrepreneurship, Casey said. A salon suite is an easier, faster, cheaper way to see if it’s a fit than pursuing a storefront or lease.
“Being an entrepreneur is some of the best and the hardest work that you’ll ever do,” she said. “I love this industry and the people that work in it. They’re interesting, they’re eclectic, a lot of them are artists. It’s an industry that has a lot of movement.”
But entrepreneurship is still hard, she said.
“Things like navigating personal relationships, and being a boss, and telling people no,” she said. “You have to really be willing sometimes to not be the most favorite person in the room.”
At SHAG, tenants can tap into the energy of the other entrepreneurs around them, Casey added.
“They understand that the hours aren’t set hours. They understand that you do things every day that are not part of your job description because it’s just what has to be done,” Casey said. “Entrepreneurs have a mindset and a flexibility that a lot of 9 to-5 people don’t encompass or appreciate. And I really enjoy being around people who just make things happen.”
Casey brings 17 years of experience as an entrepreneur to the table — and she hopes to serve as a resource.
Her biggest piece of advice? Get comfortable hearing “no.”
“I definitely have not gotten every space I wanted, or every loan I needed. Being told no becomes part of the language. If that’s really uncomfortable for you, or you’re really sensitive about it, you might want to re-evaluate. Because you just have to shift gears and keep working towards what your goal is,” she said. “Sometimes, being told no is a gift, because it would have been a mistake, and I couldn’t see it at the time.”
Have a strong vision — and surround yourself by folks who get it.
“It’s important to sort of surround yourself with the people who share those ideas and the investment in all the humans coming together for a common purpose, even if it is just haircuts,” Casey said.
As the space comes fully online, Casey hopes to spend more time behind the chair.
“I really love doing hair. I love the intimacy of a one-on-one situation with someone. And I like being skilled enough to give them a product that you know they love or couldn’t achieve on their own. I like doing a good job. There’s something that’s easier about giving someone a really great haircut in an hour and a half, as opposed to this building has taken a year,” she said with a laugh. “There’s some instant gratification in doing hair that is very fulfilling. I honestly would like to go back to doing hair at least two days a week. And now I have 11,000 square feet to do it in.”
I am Casey, and I am an entrepreneur.
There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
When Erin Parrott launched After5, she and her husband packed orders together in the basement.
Today, After5 is a full-blown women’s clothing boutique in downtown Dayton’s Fireblocks District, complete with marble floors and gorgeous chandeliers. And she and her husband, Ed, now work together on a new venture — The Reserve on Third, an elevated lounge just a few blocks down Third St. that opened in January.
“It was a process, and that’s why I always encourage people, don’t give up,” Erin said. “Because it can it can look bleak, but if you remain the forever optimist, and you put positivity in the forefront, just know that the road will pave itself. You just got to stay on it.”
For Erin, the road to entrepreneurship was a long time coming.
“I’ve always been very independent because of how I grew up,” she recalled. “My mother was a single mother, and I just saw her get so much done alone, and she came from such a gentle, kind woman, my gammy.”
Her grandmother, Marlene, grew up poor in Tennessee. She became the first of her many siblings to graduate high school and go on to college. She met Erin’s grandfather at Ohio University, where they part of one of the first graduating Black classes. After college, she became the first Black speech pathologist in Dayton.
On her father’s side, Erin’s grandmother was an educator, and her grandfather was an engineer, “at a time when there weren’t a lot of Black men in engineering,” Erin said, recalling the thick island accent he brought with him from growing up in Saint Thomas.
“I think because I come from families that kind of have made a choice to do the difficult thing, and made a choice to go the difficult route, and made a choice to not give up, that it’s almost instilled in me,” she said.”I’ve also had a sense of independence and a bit of a hustle mentality.”
Erin’s hustle was further refined when she dropped out of college to raise her daughter as a young, single mother.
“I was always creatively thinking of how I can take care of my child and myself, cause I was a very young adult, and with that creative thinking process, I’m like, you know, there’s so many things that I can do,” she said. “But at that point in my life, time and circumstances and money just did not permit it. It wasn’t feasible for me at that point.”
Because you need money to grow a business, she said.
“People don’t talk about it enough I don’t think, how important capital is. I had to pour a lot of my own money into After5,” Erin said. “Even when we started making money, I was literally having to reinvest it to grow. Keep your 9-to-5 until you don’t have to keep your 9-to-5 anymore. Don’t quit too early that job, okay!”
For Erin, opportunity came knocking during the pandemic.
“When the pandemic hit in 2020, it was kind of like beautiful chaos for me personally, because it was a really trying time for the country, well the world, but it actually gave me the capacity to sit and really think about what I really wanted to do with my brand, and who I was, and what I wanted it to be, and what I wanted it to represent to my community,” she recalled.
After5 was less than a year old. Erin pulled back on social media posts, rebranded, and relaunched.
“In 2020, it was it was slow, but not really. We increased every month in sales. And then I just put my all into it,” she said. “In 2021, we just really took off, and it’s just been scaling ever since.”
In December of 2021, she signed the lease to bring her boutique downtown, as well as online. Doors opened May 2023.
“Let’s talk about the challenge of opening a brick and mortar, okay!” she said. “With After5, this was a shell. Everything in this space is new. That being said, kind of piggyback the conversation about capital and money, and when and knowing how to invest properly so you don’t end up going bankrupt because that can easily be done when you have a big dream.”
When she and Ed took on The Reserve, the construction process was even longer, a full 18 months.
“You have to be mentally prepared for that journey cause it can be a long one,” Erin said. “There are instances when you want to say, this may not be worth it. It goes back to that forever optimistic kind of point of view, you have to look at the glass half full, and you just have to visualize the finish line. Even when it was bare bones, that’s all I thought about — it’s going to be beautiful, I can’t wait for these chandeliers to go up, even though that was 16 months later.”
Erin is currently planning for After5’s second location, which will be downtown Cincinnati. Long-term, her goal is to break into the manufacturing of the clothing business.
“I think it’ll allow me to create the things I really want to see that can be hard to find, and then it’ll also allow me to be able to help other entrepreneurs,” she said. “There are some really wonderful designers, there’s really some wonderful apparel brands here in Dayton. I just feel like being able to produce that arm of my company will give other local entrepreneurs the resource where they can actually source what they need here at at a much cheaper rate than overseas or having to go to LA or having to go to Atlanta or having to go to New York.”
In August, After5 will turn 5 — look for a celebration, Erin said.
“Entrepreneurship is not easy, so five years, I feel pretty proud that!” she said. “Comparison is the thief of joy, and everybody’s journey looks and will always be different. As an entrepreneurial community, if we look to support and collaborate more with each other, then it’ll help in creating more avenues for those who may be struggling or having challenges in areas that other other of us have overcome.”
I am Erin Parrott, and I am an entrepreneur.
There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
For Nickole Ross, cannabis is a family business.
The chief operations officer for Noohra Labs co-owns the medical marijuana processing company with her family. Her dad, Ted, is CEO; mom, Niki, is outreach director; and sisters, Neariah and Taylor, are operations director and quality manager, respectively.
“We are a company that makes medicine,” Nickole said. “We take flower that has been grown from cultivators, and then we extract all the oils and all the different cannabinoids that are inside of the plant and make it into product.”
Nickole’s path through the cannabis industry actually began with infused dining — she partnered with a chef friend to launch the first cannabis restaurant in California.
“One day we just said, hey, let’s incorporate cannabis and food together, because they are two major components that people are willing to share,” Nickole recalled. “Traditionally people use it in edibles like cookies or brownies, but you rarely find people using it for food. The conduit of food is such an important ingredient to our body. So we just decided to pair those two things together.”
At the same time, she began working with her family back home in Dayton to write their application to become Ohio’s first minority-owned, women-led cannabis company. The state awarded their license in 2019.
“There are a lot of different things that we wanted to be able to make sure we had in this cannabis industry, and one was ownership,” Nickole said. “So many people are left out due to the war on drugs. It has been a privilege to…create the impact that’s important for those who have been incarcerated based off of the same thing that we now now get to use from a legal and a medical perspective.”
But the path from getting a license to opening the manufacturing floor, was not easy — or cheap.
Nickole and company raised $5M+ to build out their infrastructure and get their doors open. And they did it without any VC dollars.
“We wanted to make sure that we stayed community-owned and also a family-owned business,” she said. “One of the things in cannabis is a lot of barriers to entry. When you get into this point to have the opportunity to be a licensed operator to produce and to manufacture cannabis, you want to be able to own and control the work that you do.”
But operating in the cannabis industry is expensive. On top of typical manufacturing costs like machineray and specialized personnel are additional costs like increased security and regulations, Nickole said.
And through it all, cannabis companies can’t access traditional banking resources, since marijuana is still illegal federally.
“If we don’t have the small business banking that we can do traditional business like construction, renovation, payroll, just cash flow, it’s hard to be able to keep running your company in an industry that has so much regulations and so much red tape,” Nickole said.
Nevertheless, the Ross family powered on, even through a pandemic, even through shifting supply chains.
“People don’t understand that I have to buy product from a cultivator in order to manufacture. A lot of people still think we are a dispensary, but we are manufacturing company,” she said. “One day we will have a dispensary, one day we will have a cultivation facility, so we can master both the growing and the retail side along with our processing that we’re currently doing.”
Launching this groundbreaking company with her family has been rewarding, Nickole shares.
“It has been a rewarding experience to learn old school principles, but also incorporate new ones that I was able to bring to the table,” she said. “But then also, just having your father, who’s also a role model to you, be your partner is something that — I wouldn’t have been able to ask for a better one.”
Her father’s business legacy in the Dayton area stretches back three decades, Nickole said. It always inspired her, but she never knew what business to pursue.
“My nature and my passion has always been in music and creative and film,” she recalled. “I’ve always been a creator and kind of a free spirit. So structure and business was just like, those are for those other people.”
Coming back home gave her the discipline she needed to run a company, she said.
“One thing my dad said is, you’re always unemployed. Because every day you got to think about how to keep the lights on, and making sure that your team is compensated for the work that they’re investing into you, and vice versa. You got to always be on goal,” she said. “You got to always be creative and think outside the box.”
But business isn’t for everyone — and that’s OK, too, she said.
“Understand what you can handle,” she said. “Because sometimes you be like, I got to make payroll, and I’m waiting for my vendor to pay me. Those are things that you got to still challenge through.”
Since launching operations, Noohra Labs has grown to provide products to 40 stores across Ohio. And they aren’t done yet, Nickole said.
“I enjoy potential. And I’ve always been a pusher. I want to direct us into the direction that can all have us thrive and grow,” she said. “When I see joy in people’s eyes because they accomplish things, and I see my own joy for manifesting something that was just on paper now into an opportunity to be able to employ and hire — it just gives me hope that we can all change something.”
The entrepreneur journey can feel dark and lonely — but don’t stop, she said.
“As new entrepreneurs, we have to give ourselves grace. When you know how to meet your own (expectations) and be still with yourself and just give yourself time to just grow and learn, you can overcome so many challenges,” she said. “Keep going, and keep striving for your own potential, cause we all have it.”
I am Nickole Ross, and I am an entrepreneur.
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
Rachel Dominguez-Benner’s entrepreneur journey spans the continent.
Her creative venture first launched in Portland, Oregon, sparked from a seed planted in Mexico, and spurred on by an art class in Penland, North Carolina. Today, Rachel crafts her home goods gift line from a home studio in an east Dayton neighborhood. You can buy beautiful Rachel DB Creative products at smattering of local retailers.
“My most popular [product] is kitchen towels,” she said. “I wanted a product that people own multiples of already, that they’ll buy more than once, that would make a great gift, because I love giving gifts. And something that…could be art and was useful, and was made of natural materials. So through all those things, we get to the humble kitchen towel.”
When she’s not screen-printing her original designs on a variety of objects, she is developing co-ops. She specializes in communications and member engagement for cooperative businesses.
“It’s my interface with capitalism. I’m just going to be straight up and say it,” she said. “Rachel DB Creative is how I am taking control of my own labor and deciding how I want to interact with using my labor in exchange for money. And so that’s also why there are the two pieces. Because there’s the tangible, beautiful, bringing art into your everyday products, and that’s great. But there’s also a lot of work to be done in helping reimagine our future together. And that’s why I’m so drawn to working with cooperatives and developing cooperative businesses.”
Rachel’s maternal grandmother first exposed her to life as an entrepreneur during summers spent in Mexico.
“In the part of the house that was on the street, she had a store. In part, that was her social connection. That was how she knew she would get to see people and get to know what was going on in the neighborhood,” Rachel recalled. “Seeing the daily flow of their life and thinking, I like this. And so I think that may have been a little seed that was planted.”
Flash forward to the mid-2000s. Rachel joined five bike mechanics in Portland to lunch a worker-owned bike shop. She was the office manager, but found herself missing her creative practice. Her then-boyfriend suggested she sew a product that would be useful to cyclists.
“And so the first things that I made to sell were actually waterproof toe-cage covers for bicyclists,” she said. “And I listed a pair on Etsy, you know this was 2006, and somebody bought them!”
She developed a few products for cyclists and attempted to wholesale them, but retailer feedback was that her products lacked pizazz. Then she discovered screen printing.
“The real pivot came when I learned how to put my own designs onto the fabric, onto the surfaces that I was using to sew into useful goods,” she said. “There’s something very, both grounding and magical, of having something that’s in your imagination, and then being able to use your own labor to bring it into our shared reality.”
Rachel prints almost exclusively on cotton, knowing it will ultimately make its way back into the environment.
She loves meeting and interacting with the customers who purchase her product.
“I’m so connected to being able to make things that I need, or that I want to use. Getting to bring people closer to how their goods are made is something that just touches my heart,” she said. “The delight and the joy that people have of knowing the person that made the thing they’re purchasing and using, that’s part of what keeps me going.”
In 2014, Rachel and her now-spouse, Ian, were getting priced out of Portland. He had ties to Dayton via family in the Air Force.
“We decided — why not Dayton?,” Rachel recalled. “The property was within our means to imagine being able to purchase a house. And the people here — we are the gems.”
Soon after moving to the city, Rachel found Launch Dayton Startup Week.
“For me, the the most beneficial resource has been the social aspect with other people who are also entrepreneurial, who are also sometimes feeling like you’re out here on your own, on an island,” she said. “Sometimes they’re called networking, but what I found in Dayton, and with Launch Dayton events especially, is that it’s not buttoned up, have to hand out business cards. It’s really getting to talk about what you’re passionate about, and being curious about other people and what they’re doing and working on, and then those connections naturally happen.”
Her advice to fellow + aspiring entrepreneurs? Share your ideas.
“Start speaking about what you dream of for Dayton, for our city,” she said. “Start telling people what you think could be better, because that’s how you get connected and attract the other people, people that want to build together to make that thing a reality.”
“I’m Rachel Dominguez-Benner, and I am an entrepreneur.”
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
Adrian Shergill has always had a passion for food. Two years ago, the passion led he and his wife, Maggie, to open a Bristish gastropub in Enon, OH.
But opening day at The Last Queen didn’t exactly go as planned.
“Should I tell you about our first day? So you have to take into context that we’ve never ever run a pub before, ever,” Adrian begins. “So we’ve done our rehearsal with friends and family, that went reasonably well, we tested everything. And you know, the clock’s ticking, it’s 3:30, 3:45, everything’s good to go, everyone’s happy. We’re going to do this.”
But a minute or two before doors opened, the pub’s ticketing system went down.
“So all these people come flooding in, and our computer system is completely crashed,” he said. “It was possibly the worst thing that could have gone wrong, because that’s the information that the back of the house needs.”
They scrambled around, made things work. And then two hours into dinner service, the system came back online.
“All the tickets came up on our screen, and it it was a nightmare, because we didn’t know what we’d done and what we hadn’t done,” Adrian recalled. “So the very first day of opening was, if anything could have gone wrong that you wouldn’t want to have gone wrong, it went wrong.
But we dusted ourselves off and carried on.”
The Last Queen specializes in typical British pub fare including fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, and a curry. They’re foods Adrian knows well from growing up in the south of England.
“I probably didn’t have the most normal sort of childhood. I’m half-Indian. There was still quite a lot of racial tension in Britain,” he recalled. “As a kid, I was obsessed with soccer, I’d be playing soccer with all the kids in the neighborhood, but it was, it was a bit of a funky time, looking back.”
Even then, Adrian loved cooking. But the thought of opening a restaurant was always a distant dream.
“From a young teenage boy, I’ve had this sort of desire to want to cook or get in the kitchen. It’s only really been a hobby, but in the back of my mind, I always thought, if the chance came one day,” he said. “And I don’t think I’m alone. I think there’s probably millions of people out there that have this dream that they may or may not do something one day.”
He set off to college to study motor vehicle engineering, but it wasn’t a fit. So in the mid-1990s, he found himself taking a job at a summer camp in the U.S. instead. There, he met Maggie.
“Ever since then, my wife and I have moved backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. And then, just for fun, we thought we’d do the same with our kids,” he said. “We dragged them from one side of the Atlantic to the other a couple of times, just to keep life spicy.”
Adrian is a natural leader.
“I don’t think it’s something that I’ve gone, I want to lead, I think it’s just the way things have turned out. So I think being an entrepreneur and running your own business is the ultimate, okay, who’s willing to come with me on this journey?”
Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, Adrian said.
“You’ve got to be prepared to put in the work,” he said. “Obviously there’s elements of luck and fortune and those kind of things in anything that you do, but you will not get those elements of luck or fortune if you don’t put in the graft.”
And you’ve got to be willing to be a little selfish.
“Not all the time, but for a period of time, because you’ve got to lock in and go, I’ve got to do this,” Adrian said. “My wife and I realized that we’d become the most unsociable people on the planet cause we’re just tired. We were working so many hours every single day, and so fortunately our friends are really understanding. You got to be prepared to put in a lot of work.”
But before you jump in — go to your local Small Business Development Center, he added.
“From the people that built our web page, to the people that clean our beer taps, our accountant, so on and so forth, you know all those things that we didn’t have a clue about, the SBDC had somebody that specifically worked with us that, anything that we didn’t know, they would link us up with somebody that knew it,” he said. “I just cannot say how important they are, because they’re not out to make money. They’re literally out to help you get your business up and running. It’s just such a safe place to go when you’re starting out.”
As The Last Queen grows, Adrian wants to encourage his staff to see their potential.
“To create an atmosphere where people genuinely seem to be embracing what it is that you’ve done — not just the the people coming in through the door that are purchasing your food, but the people that are working alongside you — that is just a fantastic feeling,” he said.
“I’m Adrian, and I’m an entrepreneur.”
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
Kathleen Hotmer and Luke Tandy’s home is filled with beautiful goods and music — and so are their stores.
Kathleen owns Pink Moon Goods at 2027 E. 5th St., and Luke owns Skeleton Dust Records at 133 E. 3rd St. in Dayton. The duo has been together since 2008, and married since 2018.
Luke opened his record store first, in October 2017. He carries have records, CDs, tapes, audio equipment and a few books that cover a variety of genres, though he specializes in noise and experimental music.
“I constantly was hearing him say things like, I just want to open a record store, and it was just something that kept coming up,” Kathleen recalled. “There was one moment when Luke said it, and I just said, Okay, let’s just do it. You want to do it, let’s start.”
At the time, Kathleen worked in the theater department at Sinclair, but within a couple years, Luke would inspire her to open her own shop, where she specializes in ethically manufactured home goods.
“I never really felt like I was a theater person,” Kathleen said. “So I think that always kind of left a door open that made me feel like there was possibly something else for me that I wanted to do.”
For Luke, the seed was planted during an intro to entrepreneurship class in college. For his final project, he imagined opening a record store. The idea lingered.
“We went to Europe in 2012, and I specifically remember going to a store in Berlin, where it was unlike any store I’d ever seen before,” he recalled. “It was incredibly unique, and just a very special store, and that moment was super inspiring to me because I was just thinking, I can make my store however I want to make it. It doesn’t have to be a certain way, it can just be my own creation. And really it was that moment that I was pretty dead set on ultimately opening my own record store.”
But it took him years to build up the confidence to actually do it, Luke shared.
“Over time, you realize that it’s possible to do your own thing, if you work hard, and you’re passionate, and you’re offering something maybe a little bit different than other people are,” he said.
Kathleen is a maker, a seamstress, and always toyed with the idea of making and selling her own product. But it wasn’t until she helped Luke open his store that owning her own business seemed like a real possibility, she said.
Writing out full business plans was a key exercise that they both underestimated at first, she said.
“We sat down, we both helped each other, and you know, we’ve never requested financing. We’ve never had to use it for anything. But it helped us solidify what our businesses were going to look like,” Kathleen said. “As I started asking those questions — what is this business, who does this business serve — I started to discover that the thing that I felt really passionate about was creating an opportunity for people to consume in an ethical way.”
When the pandemic hit in 2020, Kathleen’s plans were delayed but not dashed. When the Downtown Dayton Partnership started organizing sidewalk sales that summer, she jumped in.
“That was the first moment that I was like, okay, I’m just going to do this now,” she recalled. “It’s funny when I look back at those pictures now because i had maybe four products that I was selling.”
Now, she works with 100+ vendors to fill her store selves.
She kept her full-time job at Sinclair for two years while she grew her business and looked for a brick + mortar space.
“I was really lucky in a sense that I knew that I was going to quit my job in a certain time frame, and so I did save a lot of money,” she said. “I was fortunate that I was working in a position that paid me enough money to just start pocketing money, putting it aside.”
Owning a business is hard, but Kathleen and Luke wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I feel like both of our businesses are a reflection of who we are. It’s different than things that we did in the past where, you know, I was a theater artist but I don’t really care for a theater,” Kathleen said. “So I think that that’s something that’s really satisfying about our our current businesses is that they reflect our lives.”
“Certainly there’s a lot of stress and anxiety with owning your own business, but I have never once felt dread about going to work since I opened my own business,” Luke added. “It just seems like a natural thing that I do, every day almost, and I just never dread it. I get to be surrounded by the thing I love most every day, all day long. And sharing that with other people is a huge part of it as well.”
Meanwhile Kathleen spends her days surrounded by beauty and those who appreciate it.
“I love beautiful things. There’s so many things that, when I’ve seen them, it’s like my heart stops, or I take a breath,” she said. “That is so pretty. And I just love seeing that reaction in other people.”
Just do it, and be smart about it, she advises.
“Just do the thing. Dedicate the time to doing the smart things like, don’t put off paying your sales tax. Just figure it out. Don’t let that keep you from not pursuing something that you feel excited about,” she said.
And use fear as motivation.
“Be prepared to work harder than you’ve ever worked before, be more stressed out than you’ve ever been before. But also to remember to take those things and re-channel them and use them to your advantage,” Luke said. “Use them as inspiration to make things work.”
“The fear is the motivation for discovery,” Kathleen added. “You can be like, forget it, I can’t do this, I’m giving up. Or you can be like, okay fear, help me do something awesome.”
We’re Kathleen Hotmer and Luke Tandy, and we are entrepreneurs.
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
Gabrielle Little grew up baking rum cakes with her grandmother. But as an adult, she realized she never saw rum cakes at the grocery or at her local bakery. So she launched her own — The ScRUMptious Dessert, your one-stop shop for gourmet rum cakes.
“I didn’t know I wanted to be a baker when I was kid,” she said. “I’ve always baked things, that’s what the gifts were for Christmas.”
It was her grandmother who suggested she go to school for baking and pastry.
“It sounded like clown college,” Gabrielle recalls with a laugh. “I did not know that was a thing.”
She did know that she always wanted to make her own money.
“I knew I always wanted to create my own time, but I didn’t know what that looked like,” she said. “I would make my own money by selling candy in high school, I cut grass, I did things around the house, anything. As I got older, it turned into trying to figure out what a business would look like. I want our lives to be ours and not someone else’s.”
The first step was letting go and what she imagined a bakery business had to be.
“I had to accept that, I don’t mind making a gorgeous decorated cake, but I don’t have the mental to sit there. The tediousness of it was not me,” she said. “But creating a new rum cake flavor? It was awesome! I can do this all day long! And then people were requesting flavors, so now I had the opportunity to change.”
“That’s why I love it,” she added. “It allows me to just be bubbly and be happy and spread the light when there is so much darkness in the world right now.”
The biggest surprise for Gabrielle after she launched her business was realizing how much work goes into the back end.
“You can wake up one day and decide you want to start a business, but the desire to stay focused — you have to have a certain drive,” she said. “The part that no one speaks on is the business part on the end, all the paperwork, all the computer work, all the things that make being an entrepreneur or a boss or a CEO not fun.”
But there are things you can do to make putting in that grunt work easier, she said.
First — don’t quit your day job right away.
“One of the things I wish I would have done: pay more attention to the numbers in the beginning,” Gabrielle shared. “I said, well, we have the space, we have these things, let’s just start. The reality is, when you’re starting something from the ground up, it has nothing. It’s a small child. It comes out with nothing.”
Use a day job, or a part-time gig, to supplement income while your business grows, she said. And take on a few small markets to jump start sales.
Her second piece of advice: give yourself grace.
“Every day is not a good day,” she said. “Every day is not the best business day, but be confident enough to go forward.”
Third, build a team. By which she really means, unofficially hire your family.
“People say build a team, and they think of payroll, but build a team of people you can call and say, I need help at this event, or I need help baking today, and I can’t pay you to do that, but they will show up because they believe in you and believe in your vision,” she said.
Gabrielle describes her younger self as a troubled kid.
“I barely graduated high school,” she recalled. “When I talk to my family about it, we’re still in shock that I graduated on time, that I made it out.”
Today, that family is often her team.
“I’m a wife, a mother, a daughter, a friend. My team consists of my husband, my kids, my parents, most of my family,” she said. “I had a cousin who I called, I said, the business is growing, and I need help cleaning a whole room in the main level, can you come up? She drove up from Alabama to help us clean.”
And finally, tap into local resources.
“If you have the time, plug into as many free resources as you can. I know for the first year, I signed up for everything. People said, I just saw you — you did. You sure did. So the best way to figure out if it’s something you want to do is to keep doing it, or at least keep showing up. It feels hard, and it is hard, and life is heavy, but you’re going to be okay, and you’ve got this. Just keep moving forward.”
I’m Gabrielle Little, and I’m an entrepreneur.
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
Andrew and Tanor Banks are the 20-something husband-and-wife duo behind Performance Wraps. The vehicle treatments offer endless customization options for individuals and businesses alike.
“It’s removable as well. So on the commercial side, you can draw all the attention possible on the wrap, then 5 to 8 years later, cycle the truck,” Andrew explained. “Just pull it off, and now you can sell a white van to the next contractor.”
Two years ago, Andrew was one of the first business owners to win the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce’s Winsupply Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence.
That success was hard-earned, he and Tanor share in the latest episode of our “I Am an Entrepreneur” video series.
When Tanor moved back to Ohio to join Andrew in the business, he was sleeping on a futon at the shop. But they don’t regret the sacrifices or mistakes they made along the way.
“I essentially lost everything and hit rock bottom,” Andrew said. “In the grand scheme of life, I didn’t have much to lose. It was brutal. I lost everything. But in hindsight, I would have much rather lost absolutely everything and learned my lessons from 20 to 24 than from 50 to 54.”
“I didn’t know it was called entrepreneurship in the beginning, but I’ve always had a fascination with business,” Andrew recalls.
In the first grade, his mom packed honey buns in his lunchbox. He quickly discovered honey buns were a hot commodity. So at the lunch table, he’d sell the snacks, or trade them for someone to do his homework.
By 16, he’d harnessed that entrepreneurial spirit to launch his first business, a lawn care company. While he was mowing, he would listen to audio books and podcasts about various business topics.
“I didn’t listen to music, I studied,” he said.
He briefly went to college to study engineering. But he discovered that he didn’t want to be an engineer — he wanted to run the company that hired engineers.
One day, he was at Performance Wraps to pick up a vehicle he’d had lettered for his lawn care business, and the owner mentioned wanting to retire.
“I was young, naive, I don’t even think I could legally drink yet. I ended up buying the business,” Andrew said.
But he hadn’t asked any of the right questions. What he thought would be a $50K deal to buy the business ultimately cost him about five times that, he said. And then he discovered the business had been hemorrhaging money.
“The one thing I always tried to make sure I had paid, or at least negotiated on terms, was my rent,” he recalled. “I knew if I lost my building, I lost the business, and that’s my only shot and a prayer to get out of this thing, was the for this business to actually succeed. So yeah, that’s how I ended up on the futon. I didn’t really have anywhere else to go.”
Tanor first met Andrew in a high school business class. She believed it would never be relevant, but her mom made her take it anyway. She and Andrew dated, but after graduation, she left to attend college in Alabama.
“I was working at a five-star hotel, but I just didn’t want to be in the hospitality industry,” she said. “So I was talking to Andrew one day, he’s struggling, I don’t know what to do, so I was like, do you want some help? And he showed up two weeks later with a moving truck.”
Her one condition was that she wouldn’t sleep on the futon at the shop. And technically she didn’t — though she eventually found herself sleeping in an RV in the shop.
“We used to mow all day, and then when the sun went down, we would wrap all night, so that was how we used to pull the 100+ hour weeks very easily,” she said.
Something had to give, and in the end, it was Andrew’s lawn care business.
“Well, if you know anything about lawn care companies in general, it is impossible to get people to show up to work every day,” Andrew said. “We wrote down a pros and cons list of both businesses, and the only pro to lawn care was that I get to work outside and I get a tan, so that was not worth keeping.”
They attempted to sell the business, but in the end, they just sold off the mowers and liquidated the assets.
“We pretty much got pennies on the dollar of what it was worth, but it was a pretty big lesson learned,” Andrew said.
But the hard work and lessons learned paid off. Today, Andrew and Tanor own their shop, their home, and a couple rental properties.
“[Entrepreneurship] sucks, like it’s rough. Don’t look at the highlight reels and the Gary Vs and the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos, where they are now,” Andrew said. “Look at where they were when they started, the work ethic and the resiliency and everything else that they had to have to get going.”
Even now that the business is steadily growing, the couple still doesn’t clock out that often, Tanor said.
“Even when we have date night and go out to dinner, we like strategizing the business,” she said. “It’s just so much our life right now.”
But the disputes follow them home less now — in large part thanks to a sheet of paper that hangs on the shop wall.
“We even show our whole team,” Tanor said. “We swap roles a lot, and so it gets confusing, they don’t know who to go to. So every three months it’s like, here’s our new roles.”
Her only regret is embarking on her entrepreneur journey with a lack of confidence, she said.
“I went into this at about 21 years old, and obviously as a female. And I just felt like I didn’t belong in the business space,” Tanor said. “My only regret is thinking I wasn’t worthy of owning a business for absolutely no reason at all.”
For Andrew, it’s all about the rapid growth.
“We’re going to get to the top, and we’re going to be there,” he said. “That’s going to be incredibly boring for me. Maybe it’s five years, maybe it’s 50 years from now, but it’ll be time to train my replacement and move on to say, the cupcake shop, and let’s make that the biggest and best thing. Who knows?”
We’re Andrew and Tanor Banks, and we are entrepreneurs.
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
One day in 2000, Judd Plattenburg realized he was making his boss at Oregon Printing Communications a lot of money.
So he walked into his office and bought the business.
“I didn’t go to school to be an entrepreneur owner. I never really imagined myself doing that,” he shared. “But I also knew I was kind of running the company. And I was basically making the other owner kind of rich. So I went to him one day, and I don’t know what I was thinking, but I just said, look, I’m going to go work for a big company, or I’m going to buy this company, one of the two.”
His boss agreed, so he visited an accountant, and then his banker.
“I must have been having a pretty good day because I talked to bankers into loaning me enough money to purchase it,” he recalled. “It was a dive head-first into real business ownership.”
Judd had been working in the print shop since 1983, but he quickly learned that being the owner was different beast.
“It was not what I expected,” he recalled. “One of the biggest things was, all the people that you had worked with for all these years, that were your good friends and co-workers, all of a sudden you changed the roles, and you’re the guy that signs the paychecks.”
He took strategic planing classes through the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce and Aileron, each time surrounded by peers who also wanted to level up their business ownership.
“I couldn’t describe it at the time, but I knew I wanted to run more professionally, run it with systems as opposed to just on the fly,” Judd said. “A lot of what I learned there is, it’s about the people — managing the people, having the right people, motivating and inspiring the people.”
Printing is a capital-intensive business — it’s easy to drop half a million dollars on a single piece of equipment, Judd said. But all the expensive equipment in the world won’t get you anywhere without the right team, he said.
Today, Oregon Printing Communications has a team of 12.
“For me, 12 is a good size. There was a point where it was just like, grow, grow, grow, but I don’t want layers of management,” Judd said. “I mean, 12 people is a small company. It’s a micro company. But it’s still 12 lives that you’re responsible for getting the paycheck to them. And they depend on that. They’ve got house payments or rent payments to make and car payments, so you take it seriously.”
To keep the business moving forward, an entrepreneur has to both listen and communicate, he said.
“There’s one thing about being an entrepreneur — sometimes we can get pretty headstrong and think, my idea can’t lose, and you know what, it can,” he said. “In the earlier days, I was a little bit more headstrong, we got to do it this way, and I’ve learned to listen.”
Judd has a lot of friends who are retiring, and they keep asking when he’s going to join them.
“I just love making cool stuff,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll look at what we’re doing out there, and it just blows me away. If you would have told me that we’re doing what we’re doing right now 10 years ago, I’d have said you’re crazy, you can’t do that.”
Everything changed with the onset of digital printing — from embellishments to say, printing white ink on darker papers.
“You can do stuff now that wasn’t even thought of 10 years ago,” he said.
Off the clock, Judd is an avid photographer. He has traveled as far as Cuba to capture images. And he loves to paddle Ohio’s waterways and beyond, often with a camera in hand. He has traveled as far as Cuba to photograph He owns Sugarcreek Photography Gallery with four business partners. They display work from more than a dozen artists.
Judd’s main goal right now is to build a team that can run without him — even though it’s hard for him to step back.
“I’m passionate about it, I love being in the middle of it,” he said. “There’s not many printing companies in downtown Dayton that do what we do. And there’s so many nonprofits out there that we want to help.”
I am Judd Plattenburg and I’m an entrepreneur.
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
In 2011, Juanita Michelle Darden wanted to go back to school — but she didn’t want to change her lifestyle to pay for it.
So she opened a coffeehouse — Third Perk Coffeehouse and Wine Bar, to be exact.
“I was an early-40-something professional woman. I was living in the northwest corner of Dayton. There was no specialty coffee in the city proper, not a whole lot of amenities, so I really wanted to create a space where I could gather with my friends, have a good time, all be safe,” she recalled. “The cherry on top would be music that we love.”
Third Perk opened its doors on Fifth Street in 2015.
“It was a dream coming true,” she said. “And then you had people coming in, and they were enjoying the space.”
The coffeehouse was home to a rotation of artists displaying their work, a group of poets hosting open mic events, and a community of entrepreneurs, all working and collaborating over coffee.
“There was one time, maybe at the height of 2017, when I recognized that it really didn’t belong to me anymore,” Juanita said. “They started calling it ‘the people’s coffee house.’ You’ll come down at any given time, and you look in the coffee house, and it’s like, yes, this is such a great example of what our community looks like.”
When the Covid pandemic struck in March 2020, Juanita was already in the midst of tumultuous personal changes.
“I closed 2019 as a divorced woman. I started over, and at the height of Covid, here I am in this barely furnished apartment. And I thought that I would be having carpal tunnel surgery,” she recalled. “There were some mechanical things that needed to happen in our original location. Our lease was up. And it was just the perfect time to say, we’ll stop.”
So when retailers and restaurants reopened after the early Covid shutdowns, Third Perk was gone.
“I had hoped the governor would hold us inside just enough for me to say, hey guys, I’ve got a new space, but that’s not what happened,” Juanita said. “Things just changed, and sometimes things don’t happen the way we want them to.”
Right before the pandemic, Juanita had also expanded and opened a Third Perk location inside the Dayton Mall.
“Lord have mercy, that space just didn’t stand a chance. People didn’t return to the mall,” Juanita said.
She reopened her downtown Dayton store, this time at 146 E. Third St. But many employees of downtown’s larger companies didn’t return to the office right away. And when they did, some found new java options.
“You can’t make it up, you know? We can’t fax our business. You have to have people coming in and spending money often,” she said. “And then we’ve had some corporate giants move into downtown Dayton, and it is a popular corporate giant, and people love it. It’s hard to compete with that.”
In a final blow, Juanita’s mother died in January 2022.
“My mom never really had a chance to soak up Third Perk. Her health was pretty much on the decline as we opened, so she never spent a lot of time in the coffeehouse,” she said. “When she passed — I can turn back around now and say, oh, you stopped. I was places, I was doing things, it looked normal, but now that I look back it’s like, it wasn’t normal. You were not okay.”
Juanita set out to rebuild her business — and she wanted to invite fellow business owners along for the ride.
In May, she dropped the first episode of her new podcast, The Broken Entrepreneur. Each episode, she interviews a different entrepreneur about the stumbling blocks in their business journey, and how they moved forward.
“When I talk about the broken entrepreneur, the real premise of everything is that things can be fixed,” Juanita said. “I want entrepreneurs to know that everybody’s story isn’t Instagram-worthy. Everyone’s story isn’t one of glamour and prestige and millions of dollars. But if we understand how to pivot, refocus, retool, and relaunch, we can experience those successes.”
“When I think back on what people have said about the coffeehouse, it’s like, oh wow, I did that!,” she said. “Since opening at the corner of Third and St. Clair, magic has happened there, too. So the magic continues to happen, and I hope that that corner stays abundantly full as we give this new life to Third Perk.”
I am Juanita Michelle, and I am an entrepreneur.
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
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