IRA Network has been considered the authority on entrepreneurial strategy and implementation for over a decade. Our culture embraces the power of entrepreneurial thinking and uses that motivation to assist our clients in building and growing successful operations. The stories below are motivational snapshots of ordinary people who had the strength to take the entrepreneurial leap, and won!  We have selected these stories to highlight the spirit of entrepreneurship and share it with our associates and friends. If you have stories that you would like to share with our community of entrepreneurs or you want to share your story, please email us at mjs@businessplanfunding.com. Enjoy!  

Mrs. Fields Cookies 

Debbi Fields loved to bake chocolate chip cookies. Her cookies had two distinct qualities that were different from other cookies. First, they were larger than the normal chocolate chip cookie, bigger cookies. She had created a larger chocolate chip cookie so that she would eat fewer of them, which meant that she wouldn’t gain weight. Second, they were soft. Up until that time, the normal chocolate chip cookie was crispy. For years, she made cookies for her relatives, neighbors, and friends and all agreed that no one could make cookies like Debbi. In 1977, Debbi decided that she wanted to open a little shop in her hometown of Palo Alto, California, where she intended to sell her cookies. The stimulus behind the idea was a simple need. “I needed to share something of myself with the world,” she wrote in her autobiography, One Smart Cookie (Simon and Schuster). “I wanted to give, to be part of things. What I had available for giving was a pretty darn good chocolate chip cookie. So, to me, selling cookies in a store was a good idea.”

Unfortunately, everyone else she shared her ambition with thought a cookie store was a really dumb idea. Debbi’s husband, Randy was an economist who regularly invited his business clients-executives from major industries-home to discuss investments. Debbi would bake cookies for the people who attended these meetings. The executives uniformly loved her cookies. They loved them so much, in fact, that Debbi decided to ask their advice on opening up a cookie store. “What would you think about me starting a business to sell these cookies to the public?” she asked the executives. “Bad idea,” they said with their mouths full of cookies….”Never work. Forget it.”

Debbi asked her mother what she thought. Her mother’s reply: “I can’t believe you’re going to waste your life standing over a hot oven.”

She asked her husband, Randy, for advice: “Debbi, it’ll never work,” he said.

When she got people to explain why they felt it was such a bad idea, they made a long list. America wants a crispy chocolate chip cookie, not a big soft one, they said. Besides, Debbi was only 20 years old. She had no money, no job experience, and no formal business education.

Remarkable, despite every authority figure telling her that her idea was crazy, she decided to pursue it. She had no money, so she decided to go to banks. Or course, every banker she shared ideas with thought it was really dumb. That is, every banker but one. A loan officer by the name of Ed Sullivan at the Bank of America decided to take a chance on Debbi. His reason: He trusted Debbi and Randy and he liked her cookies!

Of course, Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chippery went on to become one of the great successes of the 1980s. The store itself became so successful that Debbi Fields started franchising the business. Soon she had three stores in the Palo Alto area and then 15. Eventually, those 15 stores turned into 600 stores all over America and in ten other countries around the world. Eventually, Debbi would own a thousand stores. Her little cookie business would be worth more than $100 million. Eventually, Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chippery became too big for Debbi to manage and she was forced to sell it. But before she did, she wrote a series of books, beginning with a cookbook, Mrs. Fields Cookie Book, which sold more than 1.5 million copies and was the first cookbook ever to be on The New York Times bestsellers list. She did a successful PBS series and hosted her own television show, “The Dessert Show.” And all of it came from her love for baking cookies and a deep faith in her own abilities.

Hard Candy

Dineha Mohager took a seemingly humble pastime; a joy for creatively painting her nails, and turned it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Dineh enjoyed mixing nail polish to create bright designs that matched her shoes. One day, Dineh, a 21-year-old-student at the University of Southern California, was walking through a local shopping mall. While in the mall, she was approached by a women who asked where she might purchase the beautiful nail polish Dineh was wearing. “Oh, I made it myself,” Dineh told her. “You mean I can’t buy it?” the women asked. “No, I’m the only one who makes it,” Dineh told her sympathetically. This same scenario repeated itself several times that day, until Dineh realized that she made something that people wanted. Together with her sister, Pooneh, and a friend, Benjamin Einstein, Dineh created Hard Candy, a producer of exotic nail polish that a year later took in $10 million in sales!!!

Kaplan Education Centers

Stanley Kaplan was a straight "A" student through high school and college. At the age of 15, he started tutoring classmates at the James Madison High School in Brooklyn, NY for 25 cents an hour. He didn’t just teach students the standard curriculum, but prepared them as well for the New York State Regents examinations, which every New York student must take to graduate from high school. Kaplan graduated with five scholastic awards. When he went to City College, he continued teaching his classmates in every major discipline-including calculus and physics. By the time he was a senior, Stanley was making almost as much money tutoring as his former high school teachers were making in their full-time jobs. Once again, teaching didn’t slow his studies one bit: Stanley was a Phi Beta Kappa student, was given an award for excellence in science, and graduated magna cum laude from City College in 3 years. Despite his obvious scholarship and ability to teach, Stanley dreamt of being a doctor. He believed his excellent academic history and Bachelor of Science degree would easily get into medical school. It didn’t work out that way, however. In the days before World War II, medical schools had quotas on how many Jews could be accepted each year. Kaplan was both a Jew and a graduate of City College, then a haven for underprivileged New York City residents of every ethnicity, especially African-Americans and Jews.

“Most people are crestfallen when they’re rebuffed,” Kaplan told reporters many years later. “But I was kind of glad. I knew I had an alternative. I loved to teach, but I didn’t want to be part of the school system. I wanted to use my own methods and develop my own programs.” As he would later say, “I was rejected by medical school to invent an industry.” Indeed having nothing else but his love of teaching to fall back on, Stanley Kaplan invented a multimillion-dollar educational business.

Kaplan got a big boost when G.I.s returned from World War II and wanted to get into college and graduate, medical, and law schools. Soon he branched out even further to prepare doctors for licensing tests, accountants for the CPA exams, and lawyers for the bar. “Students were traveling from all over the country to Brooklyn to enroll in my programs,” Kaplan recalled. Eventually, they would come from all over the world. More than three million doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, architects, stockbrokers, and teachers have matriculated at the Kaplan Educational Centers, now more than 1,000 locations around the world. More than 150,000 people study at those centers, in such far-flung places as China, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong.

Stanley Kaplan could have turned out to be a doctor, and might have made a very good one at that, but he was a gifted educator who made a great success of his life by never giving up and believing in his own talents. Yes, he was unfairly deprived of going into medicine, but because he maintained a positive spirit, and because he recognized where his true talents were, he followed the path of opportunity that was available to him. As it happened, it was a perfect fit, the marriage of talent and opportunity, which led to great rewards and the full expression of his abilities.

Papa John’s

As a kid, John Schnatter loved pizza and even learned how to make it. By the time he reached high school, he dreamed of opening not just a pizza shop, but a whole string of them all over the US. After high school, he went to Ball State College in Indiana and after graduating sold his car for $3,000, which he used to start his company. He called it Papa John’s Pizza. In the year 2007, Papa John’s was a publicly traded company with sales of more than $1.06 billion!!!