Path To Entrepreneurial Success Seldom Straight Failure Part Of Entrepreneur’s Life

Virtual Entrepreneur:

On the way to launching a profitable food-service business, Chicagoan Eric Paul Meredith worked as an employee at four major corporations.

In between, he tried his entrepreneurial hand at real estate, dry cleaning and a restaurant, but he was short on capital and expertise.

This time, though, Meredith is confident his healthy-meal delivery business, AlterEatGo.com, will make it. The company is moving into a new kitchen in July and is on target to ring up $250,000 in revenue this year, he said.

“Sales have increased, so I definitely don’t have to go back to corporate America to pay the mortgage,” he said.

Meredith’s circuitous path to small-business success is hardly unusual. Few entrepreneurs’ business ideas end up panning out exactly as planned, said Daphne Woolfolk, founder of Essati Consulting in Hyde Park. “I don’t know anyone for whom success is a straight path,” she said. “It’s about moving through failure, not avoiding it.”

Entrepreneurs who hope to get rich quick often are disappointed, said David Koehler, clinical professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Business Administration. “You can’t expect to hit a home run,” Koehler said. “Life is all about Plan B. You have to have a backup plan.”

Many entrepreneurs move back and forth between employment and launching their own businesses. Meredith, who has a degree in information technology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a culinary degree from Illinois Institute for Art, worked for IBM, McDonald’s, Aramark, Lotus and his mother’s data-processing company before launching AlterEatGo.

Continued.