Entrepreneurs discuss trials, triumphs with Athena League
September 17, 2015 | Ashley Jost
Embracing chaos and persistence.
Those were the two main themes that arose from Athena League’s Techweek event Thursday morning.
Athena League worked in conjunction with Techweek to host Hailee Bland-Walsh, owner and CEO of City Gym KC, and Jill Minton, founder and CEO of t.Loft, to speak to a crowd of roughly 100 about their trials and triumphs in entrepreneurship. Athena League is an organization that focuses on providing a community of support to female entrepreneurs.
Both women highlighted diligence, among other things, while talking about how they started with their respective businesses.
Bland-Walsh said she was raised in a house of entrepreneurs and was told from an early age that if she wanted something, she had to find a way to pay for it. A babysitting business and a college degree later, she applied the same mentality to her company.
“Entrepreneurship is a personality trait,” she said.
Let go of the idea of having a work-life balance, Bland-Walsh continued. Instead she said that businesspeople need to find work-life alignment and embrace the chaos that results from owning their own business.
Minton shared with the crowd at Union Station the sacrifices she made when launching a business.
“I had a great career… and when I started to dream about going out on our own, we had to make a decision to downsize our lives,” Minton said.
Her resilience appears to have paid off as t.Loft now has three locations that make health food and drinks. The company is planning to open another location soon in the Country Club Plaza.
To learn more about the Athena League and its VOX events, click here.
Featured Business
2015 Startups to Watch
stats here
Related Posts on Startland News
Silicon Valley vet Jason Anderson makes a game out of data collection
As a 4-year-old, Jason Anderson was captivated by the Atari classic Pong. He gawked at the game for hours after his dad brought one home in 1978. Four years later, he was so inspired by Pong that he decided to create his own game — a text adventure on the family’s Timex Sinclair 1000. Anderson…
Compute Midwest named top national tech conference
Consistently attracting futurists and tech leaders from around the U.S., Compute Midwest recently was named a national tech conference that shouldn’t be overlooked. Inc. Magazine included the annual, Kansas City-based conference on its “Top Tech Conferences You Can’t Miss This Fall” list, noting the event’s traditionally strong lineup of speakers. Presented by the Disruption institute,…
Dozens of skyrocketing KC firms break into the Inc. 5000
Kansas City held its own on Inc. Magazine’s annual ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing, private companies. The Wednesday unveiling of the Inc. 5000 featured 44 metro firms — including several area tech firms, like k12itc and Rhythm Engineering. K12itc, which in January made Startland’s 2016 top 10 startups to watch, delivers cloud-based IT services to…
Backstitch wants to fix a billion-dollar communication dilemma
With the cost of poor business communication climbing as high as $37 billion a year, Backstitch founders Jordan and Stefanie Warzecha saw an opportunity to clear the air. The married couple — who say communication has never been a problem for them — founded their corporate communications platform in 2012. Backstitch aims to mitigate the…