Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Packages to the Pros:
Lemuel Gilmore III
Through 30 years of driving a truck and delivering packages, Lemuel Gilmore III held on to a dream: to do something with sports or entertainment. Gilmore attended Saint Louis University on a baseball scholarship and at one time dreamed of coaching sports, he says, “but you know, when you’re young and you have a family, you have to get that good job.” For Gilmore, that was at UPS. He and his wife are divorced now, and two of his four children are grown. The time has come. “I’ve always said that if I ever left UPS, I really didn’t want to work for anybody unless it was a position with a major sports team or major entertainment company,” he says, but now, “I really want to see what I can do for myself.” So while still working for UPS, he’s created Evolution, a sports and entertainment management and marketing company, which he’s currently running out of his North County home. He already has three clients: a gospel singer, a lyricist, and a saxophonist. “I haven’t made money yet, but I’ve started it,” he says. By this summer he hopes to have his sports agent’s certification from the NFL Players Association.
“I understand the handwriting on the wall,” Gilmore says of UPS. “They’re not trying to let a lot of us stay here that long anymore. This is a good-paying job. It took care of my family. It’s been a good company. But you know, 30 years is a really long time for anything, and I’m not getting younger.” Still, leaving the security of his current job would give others pause. “That’s why I’m starting small and growing,” he says. “I’m going to be smart about it. I’m not just going to pull up stakes. But it’s not a hobby; it’s an investment. And I believe it’s something that’s going to pay off for me.”
Cameras to Clothing
Cindy Teasdale McGowan
In 2004, St. Louis native Cindy Teasdale was in San Francisco working as a product manager at Snapfish, an Internet-based custom photo-printing company. “I just loved, loved, loved it,” she says. “It was the best job in the world.” Then, she met her future husband, Bill McGowan, a St. Louis developer who couldn’t relocate. So she came home, married, commuted for a while, and eventually left Snapfish. She spent six months at a local ad agency while hatching a plan to start her own business, Makaboo, which she hoped would do for baby clothes what Snapfish did for photos.
Teasdale, now Cindy Teasdale McGowan, says she was fortunate to later find part-time work as director of marketing at Second Street Media, a local software company, while she prepared. “One of the reasons I was able to launch a Web-based business in this economy was because I had a really wonderful employer,” she says.
After getting Makaboo going in late 2009, she stayed at Second Street for another six months. That gave her health benefits, a paycheck, and “this grace period where Makaboo was building but not cash flow–positive, so I was able to step from one to the other without taking this huge jump.”
Makaboo (makaboo.com), an online retailer that lets people customize items such as onesies and blankets, is holding its own, she says: “We’ve been very lucky. I totally believe that if we can make it work in this economy, three years from now we’ll be golden.” Was it a scary time to follow her entrepreneurial dream? Starting a business “is scary in any economy,” she says. “And I put my own money on the line. So this is real.” McGowan, who is 34, says that if she has any regret about the path she took to Makaboo, it’s that she didn’t start sooner.
Michelob to Microbrew:
Dave Wolfe and Florian Kuplent
Dave Wolfe and Florian Kuplent (left to right above) had good jobs at Anheuser-Busch. Wolfe, a St. Louis native, had been in sales and marketing there for about 15 years. Kuplent, a German-born brewer, had eight years at the beer giant, where he’d helped create Michelob’s line of craft beers. They’d survived the cuts when the company became Anheuser-Busch InBev. They had good pay, benefits, and security. But, says Kuplent, “It had kind of always been my dream to open my own brewery.”
He and Wolfe had talked about it for several years, jokingly at first, “and the more we talked about it, the more real it became. We were looking at the market for craft beer in St. Louis and in the U.S. over the last two years, and it certainly seemed like there were a lot of things happening. So we said, ‘Hey, let’s give it a try.’”
Now, Kuplent and Wolfe are laboring in Midtown Alley on their new Urban Chestnut Brewing Company and aiming to open this month. The pair plan to brew fine beer in small batches and sell it in through restaurants, bars, and stores. Customers will also be able to sample beer at the brewery.
The startup capital’s come mostly from friends and family. They’ve traded A-B’s embrace for uncertainty, but, says Kuplent, “I think in the long run, it’ll be very rewarding. It’ll allow us to inject our own thoughts into how to run a brewery, and it’ll give us more freedom. At a larger company, you can’t do the whole thing—you’re responsible for one very specific part of the company. Here, we’re required to make everything work… I guess to some degree it’s scary, but I don’t do things spontaneously. I put a lot of thought into this. I’m convinced there’s an opportunity to make craft beer in St. Louis and be successful.”
Chemist to Cheese-ologist:
Bill Courtney
Bill Courtney mostly loved being a chemist, and there were many reasons he loved working at Washington University. But by summer 2009, he’d worked his way to a management slot at the university’s Genome Center and started to think that what would really make him happy was to find a way back to a lab. “Unfortunately, though, leaving your job in what I thought was the waning portion of the recession is not really the best idea,” he says. “I’d left a good job. I mean, a really good job.”
Courtney, who is 38, spent months fruitlessly job-hunting. His wife, Laura, was still employed, also at Wash. U. “We had determined that through cutting back on our budget, et cetera, with her salary and benefits, we would be able to tough it out for a while,” he says. And then one day, in the fall of 2009, the couple was in New York for a wedding. “My entire family are foodies, we love to dine, we love to enjoy food, and it was suggested we go to this wonderful little macaroni-and-cheese restaurant in New York City,” Courtney recalls. “And we loved it. I sat and watched the open kitchen and was enthralled by it. This restaurant was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen.
“You have to understand, I have an unnatural obsession with macaroni and cheese. Whenever my wife is out of town, I’m at home making macaroni and cheese, some version of it. So my wife turned to me and said, ‘Why don’t you just make macaroni?’ I thought that was one of the stupidest ideas I’d ever heard—yet it was brilliant in one flash.”
And that’s how Courtney came to open Cheese-ology on The Loop last summer. The summer went well, he says, and the fall was even better when Wash. U. students returned. The stupid idea is starting to look brilliant. He’s working crazy hours, of course, and it was a frightening leap, but, he says, “I’m thrilled by it. I love doing this.”
