Startup reality: After three years, still starting up
It’s not easy getting a business started up, especially if you face the financial pressure of being out of work at the same time. Ask Rosette Marturana.
Three-plus years after creating the idea — a prepaid, reloadable smart card that teens, young adults, seniors who no longer drive, travelers and others can use to get around by calling an 800-number that dispatches a taxi to the caller’s location — Marturana’s Get Home Smart Card is mostly still an idea.
“It was March 2008,” Marturana recalls. “My son was going to turn 21, and, being a single mom, I was concerned about the decisions he might make. And I found myself out of work.”
Marturana’s father had died, and his intermodal transportation business, where she had worked, closed.
Like many suddenly jobless, however, Marturana had the spark of an idea: Her Get Home Smart Card. In May 2011, however, Marturana’s card is something of a heads-up to others that getting even a seemingly good idea off the ground is no sure thing.
Marturana still is in the game. Geralyn Jackman, a sister, and cousin Karen Peterson “gave me a year of their lives” helping develop the concept and graphics. Marturana has been to seminars; talked to SCORE and the Small Business Development Center; gotten her business accepted in a national funding contest sponsored by Pepsi (which she didn’t win); been on local TV. “I’ve not had one bad response,” she says.
Neither has Marturana gotten any funding for her Mount Prospect business.
She has been looking for work, too. Marturana currently is putting in 11-hour days as a waitress and bartender at a suburban country club; she waitressed last summer and has been a demonstrator at Sam’s Club.
“I’m hanging on to my house — just barely, like everyone else,” Marturana says.
Through a friend, Marturana has connected with Strategic Business Leaders, a Northwest suburban group of faith-based business leaders who were asked to provide a strategic overview for Marturana.
“She has done an excellent job of putting together the process of a product,” says group leader Denny Grim, head of Elgin-based Business to Business Communications, Inc. “But people will not beat a path to your door just because you have a product.”
Still, buoyed by input from a 90-minute session with what she calls “the committee,” Marturana is taking a new approach to starting up — offering brewers, for example, the Get Home Smart Card as a way to back up their drink responsibly advertising messages. And, with some help inside the card industry, she has found program managers who may bid on developing her card for a fee.
Thinking about a startup? You might want to read this column again.
Ÿ Contact Jim Kendall at JKendall@121Marketing Resources.com.
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