“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.”
New to SmallBizSurvival.com? Take the Guided Tour. Like what you see? Get our updates.
- Community engagement planning: old way vs. Idea Friendly way - October 3, 2021
- Boost your maker economy with a “Made in” day - September 17, 2021
- How a ghost town made something from nothing with a folk festival - September 3, 2021
- Rural business idea: sell foraged fruits and more - August 3, 2021
- Best practices for rural housing - July 19, 2021
- How to be more open to new ideas #IdeaFriendly - July 3, 2021
- Market your small town as a movie filming location, attract movie and game fan tourists - June 28, 2021
- Survey of Rural Challenges 2021 results, analysis of themes from 2015 through today - June 7, 2021
- What makes a small town a micropolitan or nanopolitan? - May 22, 2021
- Improving Rural Housing: turning blighted dilapidated houses into new homes - May 7, 2021
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.