The next big thing

 Part of me wants to be just a poet and a gardener, weaving words and guiding grapes up trellises. My grapes escaped their trellis and grew high into the branches of the pine trees above my garden, and I realize I must climb to harvest my grapes.

 Yet the only reason I have had time to dabble in such pastoral pursuits, as gardening, is because of the generosity of those of whose knees I sat at as I learned business as a child. Bedtime stories became quests of learning everything my father ate on a business trip. Movies became times to clip leads or fold brochures. Family holidays always became business planning sessions.

At 17, I opened my first business, the only dance studio in the town we had moved to for my parents business to grow. I had 3 students and we put on a full length ballet, with a little recruiting from students at the dance studio where I trained, before I moved to college.

As my parents business made its first million, I eyed the MBA program at my college. Then I got married and started having children, but the maternity clothes were not cutting it. So by my third child I opened a new business, using the infant technologies available to online retailers in the early 2000s. 

After struggling to open clothing production facilities in the USA,  mostly due to my failure to create a functioning team, and being overwhelmed with my own children’s needs at the time. We chose to downsize just to me again, but still hit all of our growth estimates until I had my 5th baby. Then I knew I could either grow my business or my children.

Now we have another business, one that I must climb to harvest. That climbing includes learning how to market the technology that revolutionized in-floor heating, learning how to manage and focus our talented team, and learning how to set up manufacturing and fulfillment. 

Our current marketing and sales team is staffed by engineers, attempting to market to the Heating and Plumbing professionals, which is the lowest value proposition market we have access to. One year ago, I took over the online marketing bringing us to the do-it-yourselfers and small contactor market. Our online sales have triple the closure rate with 10% higher margins than our average sales. 

I want to know enough to bring HUG Hydronics to the world, starting with North America and then Europe.  I need to learn how to manage people, build networks, finance a growing business, add to my abilities to analyze data and see trends, and build sustainable and robust supply chains in our ever-changing economic and physical environments. 

I see the MBA giving me the tools to climb and harvest safely. I see St. Catherine’s MBA as being particularly valuable in helping me navigate a traditionally male centered business and learning how to establish a workplace that values all voices, experiences, and backgrounds.