“I’m kind of the spinning plate lady,” Glenna Mae Hendricks said of her small business enterprises.
You know Glenna Mae as Maesz, one of our contributors here. She was also one of the featured speakers at the recent entrepreneurship event in Alva.
“I’ve been an entrepreneur since the early 70’s,” she said. “I’m kind of the example of don’t do it my way.”
She and her husband had no resources and no business plan.
“You just had to tell the bankers what you wanted to do and why it would work,” Glenna Mae said.
When they bought an oil field service company, they had to learn a lot of regulations really fast.
“Don’t do it this way people!” she said. “It’s not easy!”
“I don’t make a real good employee,” she said. “I don’t always know when to shut my mouth with a boss… But now I’m the boss, and if I know it’s right, I do it.”
In 1992, she bought a liquor store, even though she had never worked in retail in her life.
“All right, why not?” she thought. “I can do this.”
“I approached it like a service business and I truly believe that that’s what made it succeed,” she said.
Her ultimate advice to would-be entrepreneurs?
“Everyone ought to try it at least once.”
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
That’s my mantra: try everything once.
Except chicken feet. I won’t eat chicken feet. I visited China two years ago, ate at a corporate dining room where the company presented us food, and one of the side orders was chicken feet. You could count the toes. No thanks.