What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [107]
After two troubling local events—the mother of one of Nell’s friends was carjacked from her home in Nutley, New Jersey, and killed, and a former postal worker killed four people at a small post office in Montclair—and after her mother put the condo in West Orange up for sale, Myrna decided to move to Falls Church, Virginia, where she had friends. Serendipitously, the move proved an unexpected boon for mother and daughter, then fifty-three and thirteen, respectively.
Myrna got jobs teaching art in the Fairfax and Alexandria schools. And after completing eighth grade and taking competitive entrance exams, Nell, a precocious learner, was admitted to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, considered one of the nation’s best high schools. Nell did extremely well there—particularly in playwriting and Shakespearean studies—and made a slew of new friends. With her daughter happy and achieving, Myrna returned to experimenting with anamorphosis, using it to whet the appetites of her students for art and drawing. Her toy was moribund, but her obsession was intact.
Six years later, when she was fifty-eight and Nell was heading off to Carnegie Mellon University (where she majored in computer sciences and Japanese and minored in robotics), Myrna spotted a small article in the local newspaper. It reported the opening of the Women’s Business Center of Northern Virginia, with the support of the federal Small Business Administration. The center then amounted to a small classroom with five computers and two telephones. After her crushing experience with Pentech, she was almost phobic about business. But in the spring of 2001, she got up the nerve to visit the women’s business center. “When I strolled in, they put an arm around me and they gave me chocolates and cookies and they asked me, they really asked me, how they could help,” she said. “It was a very welcoming environment. The whole intimidation factor disappeared.” “I said to myself, You have no more excuses, your daughter is safely ensconced, you have time to yourself. Use it! I wanted to confront myself because I had been avoiding finding out what had gone wrong and how to fix it. I didn’t have a specific question because there was so much I didn’t know and so much I needed to know.”
When Myrna first appeared at the center, “she was in bad straits and very discouraged,” recalled Barbara Wrigley, the center’s founding and executive director. “Myrna is not an uneducated woman, but she had been taken advantage of because she had a small, woman-owned company, and she was older.” In her assessment, Myrna had fallen prey to one of the most common mistakes made by first-time women entrepreneurs. She had gone into business without spending enough time planning, doing due diligence, and lining up trusted accountants and lawyers able to put strategic business elements in place. She badly needed to rewrite her business plan.
Myrna began anew, gradually this time. She started hanging out at the center, networking, and attending classes and conferences. She read books on business. And she drilled herself with flash cards: What is a spreadsheet? What is profit? What is loss? “The whole numbers side of business had been a barrier to me. I said to myself, You’ve got to deal with this. You’ve got to know this side of things if you want to succeed. You can’t just tra-la off into the sunset anymore.”
Later that year, one of the center’s administrators showed her a flyer from Oprah’s Oxygen Channel announcing the second annual “Build Your Own Business” contest. Entries were due in days. Though she did not yet have all the answers she needed for her new business plan, the contest only required an executive summary. Myrna figured she could write that well enough. She went to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, and spent a long weekend interviewing kids on the beach and writing. She got her entry in by the September 10 deadline.
The next day, as she waited in a school cafeteria for her students to arrive, she learned of the attacks on the Twin