Wisconsin Public TV University Place Entrepreneurship in Society  Catherine Hooper "Entrepreneurial Opportunities in Crisis Management"  March 30, 2011 UP574   cc >> Jeanan Yasiri: This is Entrepreneurship in Society. It's a course that's offered through the University of Wisconsin School of Human Ecology. I'm Jeanan Yasiri. As we begin today, I'd like to extend thanks to our partners in supporting this course, the UW Office of Corporate Relations, the UW College of Engineering for their technical support and financial support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation which is committed to advancing academic education in entrepreneurship. Additionally we'd like to thank our media partners, Wisconsin Public Television and their University Place crew for taping today's lecture. I am very pleased to introduce our special guest this afternoon, Catherine Hooper president of Black Umbrella based in both New York City and Los Angeles. Catherine began the development process for Black Umbrella in the wake of Hurricane Katrina when she realized the need for a mainstream preparedness company to serve not only her family but every family. She deepened her understanding of preparedness through training and first aid, self-defense, and survival psychology and formed relationships with decorated law enforcement and first responders across the nation. She also began a master's degree in emergency management. Catherine is a life long entrepreneur with a track record of successful investments in businesses, as diverse as Blow Styling Salon, the first salon to establish the everyday grooming category. 

Urban Angler, a globally recognized fly fishing brand, and Able Automatics, a precision machine shop. In 2010, Black Umbrella began serving clients in New York and Los Angeles with in-home visits and conducting services by telephone nationwide. Catherine regularly speaks about preparedness at public and private venues and donates the company's services to families in need. Please join me in welcoming Catherine Hooper as she talks with us about her experience as an entrepreneur and developing Black Umbrella. [APPLAUSE]  >> Catherine Hooper: I spoke with a group of Girl Scouts last Friday. They were second- and third-grade girls. I think their attention span was about 10 minutes. I think you all are 16th graders, 17th graders, something like that, so I'm hoping if we extrapolate that out, your attention span will be about 40 minutes. I'll talk during that time and then you should have plenty of time to ask me any questions that you'd like based on the things that I'm talking about or anything else. The Girl Scouts is not my only venue, as Jeanan had mentioned in her introduction. 

I speak regularly at companies and organizations about the five steps for making your family's emergency plan. And when Jeanan got in touch with me and said, we'd love to have you come here and speak at the University of Wisconsin, I knew this wasn't the talk she was looking for, so I asked her, well, what is your audience interested in hearing if it's not that? And she said what we're really interested in hearing is about entrepreneurship, and what are the things that you as an adult in the entrepreneurial world would like to, would hope that someone would have shared with you when you were an undergraduate. When you were the person sitting in the seats. The things I wish someone had said to me when I was an undergraduate could probably fill several books, in fact they have filled several books, so in addition to talking to you today and giving you what I think are the three most important qualities to bring to your entrepreneurial career, I'm also going to be giving you some titles of books that are a real asset going forward as an entrepreneur. So how many of you have already been involved in a business on an entrepreneurial level? You've either started a business, been a partner in a business? And paper routes count. So, okay. And how many of you intend to do that in the future? Are thinking about doing some entrepreneurial? Great. So some of the things I'm going to say today may sound like things you've heard before, but what you're going to hear is all of these ideas and lessons as they've applied in my entrepreneurial story. Growing up, I was always the kid with the lemonade stand, but that did not mean that as an adult that I thought I had a future as an entrepreneur. When I was your age and into my early adulthood, what was really important to me in my career was to be of service. 

I felt as though I may have certain gifts and the best thing that I could do was bring those gifts to bear in the form of a contribution to the larger world. So my first job out of college was as a writer at an ivy league university working for the president, for the deans, and for some of the high-level faculty to help them compose the letters, the speeches, the talking points that they would use in speaking with major donors. So I felt as though I had this skill set in writing and a real interest in writing, and I was going to use that interest in writing to help this university raise money. And I thought this would be a wonderful contribution. Now, this job had a very interesting task that was part of it. It was a fascinating task and it was something I was completely unprepared for. So I, as a person who was charged with writing a letter to a wealthy donor, one of the things I had to do was go to the school's research library and read everything about that individual. That may start with their initial application to college. It might include some of their course work while they were at the school. Their grade transcripts, letters that they wrote to various faculty members over the years, all of the press clippings about their career. 

And as I continued in this job and began to read more and more of these life stories of people that had been incredible successes, what I recognized is that all of my expectations about the entrepreneurial success were completely wrong. I was completely wrong. My assumption was that if you were going to be a success as an entrepreneur, you probably started out from a great background. You probably had a trust fund. You probably came from an entrepreneurial family. You probably had excellent grades. And as I began reading more and more about these individuals, what I came to recognize is that these people were not disproportionately the best students. They were not disproportionately the people with the privileged backgrounds. What they were, were risk-takers. These people had a certain fearlessness. 

And I think that fearlessness is probably one of the first things that you can bring into your entrepreneurial career to help you achieve the things that you want to achieve. I want to give you one example. One of the people that I wrote a letter to, that I was in charge of writing to, is someone that you've probably all read about in the Wall Street Journal. He worked as a caddy to make enough money to go to college, just like in the movie, and once he was in school, and he wanted to work on a hedge fund on Wall Street. He was fascinated with a particular hedge fund manager. So he wrote him a letter and said you don't know me, you don't know anything about me, but I've read about your career, I'm fascinated about you and I want to work for you. I'll do anything. I will clean the toilets and I'll empty the waste pails and I'll do whatever it takes to be in your orbit. Today that fund is named for both the original founder and that letter-writer. And he's considered to be one of the best stock pickers on Wall Street. 

He didn't get there because he came from a great background, he got great grades. What he brought to that was the willingness to be the guy that wrote the letter. So that's something that I hope all of you will incorporate into your thinking about your future. Being that person who is willing to pick up the phone, willing to write the email, willing to write the letter. And I don't want to spend the rest of this talk on fearlessness, because there is a great book on fearlessness by 50 Cent, as you know, one of the intellectual luminaries of our day. But this is a fabulous book. And it explores this concept of fearlessness again and again in ways that are very creative, and I think an asset to any entrepreneur. So by the way, as I said I'm going to talk for 40 minutes, but if any of you have a question as I'm speaking in the middle, please don't hesitate to raise your hand.  So hearing these stories of other people's lives, hearing about their successes, led me to look for an entrepreneurial career of my own. And I want to say something about service. 

As you know, I got involved in that work because I wanted to be of service. And what I came to realize is that the people who had gone on to found companies, employ hundreds of people, and make millions of dollars were able to do with one check what I probably was not going to be able to do in my entire service career. I wanted to have that kind of power and I came to recognize that doing good and doing well did not have to be opposites. Those two things could be linked and that you could bring a service aspect to anything that you wanted to achieve. So taking off from these lessons, I decided that I wanted to buy a business and I identified the business that I wanted to buy. And it was a retail store. I had a lot of fear in approaching the owner about her willingness to sell to me, but, you know, I finally made that call. A friend gave me a great piece of advice. My friend said anybody you call is lucky. And I love that idea, that I had all this fear about calling her, but that in fact she was lucky to be getting a call from somebody who wanted to buy her company. 

So knowing that I was going to buy this retail business and striking the deal, I proceeded to take every class I could find in retail accounting, retail logistics, merchandising, inventory. I read every book I could find, and cobbled together really my own little education about retailing. And I had so much enthusiasm for this business. I was so excited that it was devastating to me when the seller pulled out of the deal at the 11th hour. She really decided that she wanted to leave the business to her son, so here I was, kind of all dressed up and no place to go. And I was devastated. At this point, the story is going to take this hockey stick turn. Given that I had this disappointment and given that I wasn't going to buy this business, I decided that what I should do was take a lesson from the writer, Elizabeth Gilbert. Do any of you know, now she's a famous writer, she wrote a book called "Eat, Pray, Love." At the time she had written a little article about fly fishing for bone fish in Venezuela. I thought that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to go away for five days, learn to fly fish and get my mind off of about how upset I am about this business completely, reorient my thinking and have this vacation. 

Do any of you fish? Is anybody here into fishing? Yes, okay, great. So one of the things that's interesting about fishing is that it does really kind of reorient your thinking. If you know any fisherman, they have to show you their fishing pictures. So this is my fishing picture from my first trip to Venezuela. Needless to say, I fell completely in love with fly fishing. And decided it was something that I wanted to pursue, not just on this one trip, but in the future. So I came to New York and I visited for the first time the retail store that had put together that trip for me. And when I walked in, I realized that this business, it's called Urban Angler in Manhattan, this business had all of the attributes that I had seen and loved about my first opportunity. It had an amazing clientele. It had an incredible market. 

Urban Angler is the only fly fishing store in all of New York City, in the five boroughs of New York City. So 20 million people, one store. It's just an incredible opportunity. It also had the pieces that made it worth buying. For instance, the ownership was a little bit tired of running the company. The inventory was old. The business was dusty, it was stale. It was ripe for reinvention. So within about a year of stumbling upon this business in a way that I had not anticipated, at all, I became an owner of the company. And, in fact, we did reinvent it. 

So we moved the store to Fifth Avenue. We remerchandised and built this beautiful boutique location for our clientele that really suited the price point, that suited the market, and we were able to expand the business. We developed a mail order division, but before I get kind of caught up in talking about the successes of that business, I want to make sure that I let you all know about my biggest mistake with this business. And hopefully save you from this same mistake. Do you see these big fish up here? I don't think I have a pointer. These big things? So the person who hung those on the wall on the ladder with the level, that was me. And all of these shirts, I folded every one of those shirts. I bought this rug. I laid the rug, all these rugs I put together. I mean, there was no part of this business that I didn't touch with my own hands. 

When the boxes came in, I unpacked all the boxes. I did all the receiving. I put all the price tags on. Every aspect of the business, I touched. And that was probably good in the beginning, but I was unable to let go. So I was involved in this business for about nine years. And I spent six of those years working in the business, not on the business. What's working on the business? It's opening a new location. It's finding new ways to develop your commission structure so you achieve greater sales. Developing a mail order line. 

Expanding your business through social media. There's a million ways to work on the business that have nothing to do with folding shirts. So eventually I realized that I could hire someone for minimum wage to ring up customers, that I could hire great salespeople to sell, that I could hire people to do these functions that I knew how to do and I could work on growing the company. And I can't say enough about that. I think it's the classic entrepreneurial mistake. I'm not alone in thinking that. This is a book. Have any of you read this book? "The E myth"? This is all about the concept of working on the business, not in the business. Right? If you have a bakery, don't be the one who bakes the pies. Be the one that expands it to 15 locations across your city. 

So this book is on that topic, and it's an excellent book for helping you focus your thinking on ways to work on your business. I sold my equity in-- Oh, let me backtrack, because this is really where the seeds of Black Umbrella began, as Jeanan mentioned. In 2005, I took a short break from the business because I had a baby. And my daughter was born in the early part of 2005. Hurricane Katrina hit in September of 2005. And at that time, as I was watching this devastation unfold on television, as so many people were, one part of me was thinking, I can't believe people didn't get out. I can't believe people didn't have a plan. And another part of me was thinking, I live in New York City. I have no plan. What if we were to have another terrorist attack, what if we were to have a natural disaster like that? Would I really be the smart one that got out? Or would I be the person standing on the roof having to have the helicopter rescue me? So Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call for me in terms of having an emergency plan and a sense of self sufficiency. 

And as I began using the resources that are available from FEMA, from the New York City Office of Emergency Management, from the Red Cross, what I realized was that while there was a tremendous amount of great information out there, there were very few best practices. So while you might say, I don't know if you have this in Madison, but in New York City we have on the sides of buses and bus shelters, everywhere you look, Public Service Announcements that say make a plan, get a kit, be informed. The federal government is relying on all of us to be able to be self sufficient for three days in an emergency. Yet, I had no idea how to make that plan. What did that entail? What was the first step, what was the second step? So in making a plan for my family, I had to build that set of best practices. And once I had done that, I thought this is a complete waste of energy for this just to benefit me. This should be able to benefit all families that are interested in doing this. I should have a way to disseminate this in a broader way. And that's where the idea of Black Umbrella was born. So after I had developed this methodology, I hired someone to go and do this methodology for the numerous friends and family members who said, wow, you found a way to do that for yourself, can someone come do it for me? Do you know anyone that can help me? I sent this woman to many different households, to try out the methodology, find out what worked and what didn't, and get a sense of the efficacy of a service like this. 

And at that time, remember, I had a new baby, I had Urban Angler. I was developing some interest in other small businesses, it was not the time for me to launch that company. But that didn't mean that I didn't get a toe hold in and get the plan written and keep all of that information. So something that, you know, you might hear because you're young people or because you're interested in entrepreneurial things, I heard all the time from the time I started Black Umbrella till I launched in 2010, well, you know, when are you going to do that? You really need to follow through with that. Well, I did follow through, it just took me, depending on how you count it, between three and five years. The reason I'm telling you that is that as entrepreneurs, you're going to have hundreds of amazing ideas. You're going to have so many great ideas that you don't have time to get them all off the ground. And there's nothing wrong with that. Those ideas may come back into your life at a certain time, or they may not, but in any case having the great ideas and maybe not bringing them all the way to fruition is not a bad thing. So it's worth keeping those ideas, keeping the packet on the shelf. 

As I did with Black Umbrella. So as I said, I developed all of the resources for building Black Umbrella and it wasn't until I sold my equity in Urban Angler in 2009 that I was able to begin building the infrastructure of the company in a real way, incorporating, hiring employees. This was a new venture, because I had been involved in a retail business with the doors open, where people came in all day long. I always had something to do, and all of a sudden I had a start-up. At first, I was just operating out of my home office. And, although, I had built up demand and clients that were interested and although I was beginning to hire employees and although I had lots of help in terms of infrastructure, I had a new task as an entrepreneur, which was not necessarily to be the one working on the business, but the one who did the execution. So execution is the difference between success and failure. All of you will have good ideas, but you don't need to have a good idea. All you need is to be able to execute on your idea. We all look at something like, what's the blanket with the sleeves? The Snuggie. 

So we all look at an idea like that and say, how did that happen? How did somebody invent this thing that is maybe just a robe backwards, or it's not necessarily the most exciting idea anyone has ever come up with. The difference between someone who makes a success of that business and someone who has a really great idea that goes nowhere is all in the execution. It's entirely in the execution. So there are different methodologies for being good at execution. One I particularly like is in this book by Scott Belsky, called "Making Ideas Happen." Now this book is written primarily for creatives, it's written for graphic designers, architects, people who are very project-based. And they need to count on themselves in order to push their ideas forward. You as entrepreneurs have the same task. You are the ones in charge of pushing your ideas forward. And there will be so many distractions for you, even as young people perhaps without families yet, you've got a big social life and a million distractions and that just keeps going the further along you get in life. So Scott Belsky's book is about how to distance yourself from those distractions, have your ultimate goal, break that down into smaller steps, break that down into action items and then conduct all of your business with that bias towards action that allows you to execute on your ideas. 

He speaks quite regularly, and if any of you are interested, you have the opportunity to see him speak. But I want to wrap up today by talking about the one thing that I hope you take away from this talk, which I think is the most important message for you as young entrepreneurs. It's that piece of advice that that friend gave me. Anybody you call is lucky. Now, when I got that advice, we didn't live in the world of email yet. We certainly didn't live in the world of Facebook and Twitter, but it's a very important idea. All of us may read about somebody in the paper or in a magazine or see someone on television and think, I admire that person. I would love to talk to that person. I'd love to get to know them. But they seem as though they're in another world, they're in another plateau. 

That's absolutely not true. Even this, you know, someone like Steve Jobs, may get hundreds of emails or letters or phone calls a day. But if you kind of carve out the people who are maybe a little bit crazy and you just focus on the people who have a legitimate interest who are smart and who have something clear to ask, then it's a very small number. I can tell you of my own experience in reaching out to anyone who has ever been interesting to me, you'd be surprised how often you get an email back almost immediately and I wouldn't be here speaking with you today if Jeanan hadn't written me and asked me to come and it so happened that it worked for me to be able to do that. So I encourage you to have that fearlessness and I encourage you to work on your businesses and I encourage you to be good at execution. But the first and foremost part is don't be afraid to be the person who picks up the phone call. And to that end, I hope you all will make me lucky by getting in touch with me. So who has questions? >> The students know that I walk around with a mic I'll just hand it off to them. I appreciate your comment about not being fearful of reaching out to people who you may not know and admiring them or folks that you may admire. We were talking about networking last week and I had a very similar message in terms of you never know who wants to meet you and especially students. 

Can you think of somebody that you reached out to that might have surprised you at one point? >> Oh, well, okay. There's a woman named Linda Resnick Probably none of you have heard of her, but you've all used her products. She owns Fiji Water. She owns Teleflora. She owns Palm Juice. She's an amazing woman. She happens to also be a self-made billionaire. She's very beautiful and young and inspirational. I read a profile of her in New York magazine. I kind of set it aside and I thought, I hope I meet this woman one day. 

And within a couple of months I got invited to a lunch in New York called the Power Lunch for Women, when a friend said, could you please come and be my date, and when I got there, Linda was the honoree. And I thought, this is-- very often when we send these wishes out to the universe, I don't know how this works on the level of physics, but they come back to us. So although she was the honoree and she was surrounded by people the entire time, I felt it was very important that since she had been put in my path that I had to go over and say hello to her. So I introduced myself and I said, maybe a sentence about me and what an impression her career had made on me. And her immediate response was, I live in Los Angeles and do you think if you're in Los Angeles, would you come to my house and visit me?  And so that was an amazing invitation. And I did visit her in Los Angeles a few months later. She has a spectacular home and she's an amazing inspirational person. But, you know, one of the things that you find about someone like that you admire, is that they're very normal, they're very ordinary. And they are just as interested in you as you are interested in them. I don't know anything about the backgrounds of each of you as individuals, but if you put yourselves in the shoes of someone like that, someone who's self-made, incredibly wealthy, has all of these assets to invest, what are they looking for? They're looking for you. 

They're looking for young, exciting energy. People with ideas. People with the excitement to carry out a project. So you represent something that they might not have anymore in the same way that they used to, and that's something that all of you can capitalize on. >> Hi, my name is Jewel Rose. I'm curious a little bit about Black Umbrella. Do you work with even like smaller scale emergency plans, like say, someone's like the father of the family dies. Do you work on things like that, or is it just not even natural disasters, but large scale disasters? >> Yes, in fact, most people, most of our clients do not like to think about something like tsunami, earthquake, tsunami, nuclear disaster. That's not the type of stuff they want to deal with, even though that may be the eventual goal of the plan, to be protected from a very large disaster. Our focus is the steps that you can take on an everyday level to help you no matter what happens. 

So, for instance, all of us go through personal tragedies, like bankruptcy, losing a job, divorce. And it's amazing how the steps that you can use to protect yourself from something like a hurricane Katrina are the same set of steps that would be useful in some of those personal emergencies. Something that we do with our clients that is really suited to the type of tragedy that you're talking about is we do critical document storage and organization. So when we go to the client's home, we have a computer, we have a scanner, and we take all of the client's identification, birth certificates, passports, Social Security cards, all that type of basic identification, plus life insurance policies, wills, trust agreements, the power of attorney, all those important documents and scan them and save them onto an encrypted flash drive and every member of the family has that all the time. So wherever you are, you have an encrypted flash drive that has all of these critical documents on it. And in a worst case scenario, if you lost a spouse or lose an important relative, you have copies of all of these things and you don't have to spend the first two months after you've lost this person trying to assemble all those documents that you're going to need to carry out and execute their will. >> Hi Catherine, my name is Yvette. >> Hi, Yvette. >> I was just wondering, how do you market this product without exploiting people's fears. I mean, this is a product that people-- >> That's a great question. 

>> In a sense, can do on their own. >> Yeah. So we have three core values at Black Umbrella and one of them is confidence, not fear. And I just did an interview for "Redbook" last Friday. And the interviewer at the end of the interview said, well, I haven't done any of these steps that you're talking about. I haven't taken any of these steps. So now I feel really afraid. And what I said to her was, you would feel so much less afraid if you do these things that are in your own interest. If you'd take these steps to building a plan. The example I used is that when we see the sprinkler system or we see fire extinguishers, we don't look at something like that, a fire extinguisher, and say, oh, that makes me afraid of fire. 

You think, oh, that makes me feel confident that if a fire were to break out, there's a fire extinguisher right there. So we really don't intend to market or try to market through fear. We try to market through the peace of mind that you have once you've taken these steps that are good for you. >> Hi, my name is Alyssa, I'm from New York, so thank you for coming here. >> Hi Alyssa. What part of New York are you from? >> West Chester. [LAUGHTER] Two questions, the first one is, you've described to us and also in your bio, you have a long track of entrepreneurial ideas and successes. Do you think that Black Umbrella is the end of your track, or do you want to continue and dabble in other areas? That's the first question. >> Well, you know, you never know what's down the road. I'm really happy to be focused on Black Umbrella right now. 

It's not the only company in which I have my hand right now. But if this were the last business that I worked on for let's say another ten or 15 years, that would not feel, that would not feel complete. So what I really hope to do, and what I think all of us are interested in doing is taking the things that we've learned and using them to help other people. So if Black Umbrella was the last company that I worked on, it certainly wouldn't be the last project, because I would want to continue to reach out to people and share things that I've learned and help them on their paths. >> And the second question. >> Sure. >> I was on your website and I was noticing the prices. Do you think, or what's your experience with people who are looking into your business and think that it's a great idea, but don't necessarily have the money to come up with a plan, because a plan should be for everyone. >> Absolutely. >> Everyone is just as vulnerable to tragic events. 

>> Let me go back to that interview that I did in "Redbook" last week. This is exactly why I do interviews like that. I was on "Dateline" last week, and I don't know if any of you saw me. But the thing I say again and again is you don't need me to do this. Right? Just like you don't need a personal trainer if you want to do sit-ups. You can make a plan for yourself without my services. My services are there for the people that are having a really hard time doing this for themselves and they have the assets to hire somebody to help them. It would be my dream if people, if everyone did this and there was a culture of preparedness in this country like you see in other countries where people are far more self-sufficient and far more capable of surviving calamities. So that's a great question. And as I said, whenever someone gets in touch with me, which they do frequently, asking about our services and say, you know, I don't have really have the money, I was just emailing with someone today. 

I was saying, okay, here's how you do this without me. Here's something you can do today, take this step and then email me back. >> Catherine, I'm thinking about the group and I'm going to ask about Black Umbrella. The folks that you are serving don't want to proactively think about these kinds of things. So how do you find your customers? Is it advertising, is it word of mouth? >> It's all word of mouth. Right now it's all word of mouth. We do a tiny bit of advertising, but it's mostly, someone asks me for their charity journal ad and I want to help them out. Our business operates by word of mouth, primarily because once you get one family to go through the process and they have such a positive experience, they leave having built this plan on this real kind of high of confidence, then they talk to all their friends about it. And another great piece of marketing that's kind of embedded in the plan is our wallet cards. I don't know if any of you saw these on our website. 

I can show you one or pass it around. But we make for all of our clients a wallet card with their family crisis management team and all of their numbers on the back. And everyone, even my six-year-old carries one in her backpack to school. And when people see that card, this beautiful black anodized card with the family's name on it, whether they're in line at the grocery store or at an event and someone pulls out their wallet, the people around them say what's that. I want one of those. And I can't tell you how many people call us and say I saw someone who had that card and I want to have that card. So the marketing aspect is really word of mouth. And, you know, we have looked at ways of advertising, but to your point, it is really difficult to find out how to create an ad that doesn't have pictures of mushroom clouds or volcanoes in it. You know, that's not the way we want to market, so word of mouth has really suited us. >> One of the other things that you mentioned in the course of your presentation that I found really interesting and a bit inspiring on a personal level was the fact that you, and I don't remember exactly the words that you used, but you said there came a point when you were with Urban Angler where you realized you really needed to be hiring other people to do certain tasks. 

Can you tell us about that story? What became the critical moment where you realized, I'm wasting my time where I could be doing something else? Was there something, a tipping point for you in a form? >> I'm not sure if there was a tipping point, but I think, I don't know how many of you studied accounting or how many of you studied finance, but when I look at a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet, those tell you a story about the business. And when I looked at our ratios of our expenses as related to similar businesses, what I saw were the ways we were underspending and overspending in various categories. And that tells you what you need to do with the business. And I also, you know, a tipping point certainly occurs when you realize how much of your personal life and the fun things that you like to do on the weekends are being taken away from you because you need to go into the office and relabel, you know, 1,500 units of hooks. That's not fun. So when you're faced with that, you do look at it and think, how can I retool this business to give me more of the things I want and less of the things I don't. >> One thing that we try to talk about a little bit this semester has to do with mentors. Have you had a mentor and how important have those people been in advancing your entrepreneurial career? >> Well, I want to say that I would love to answer this question by telling you that I have had so many inspiring women in my life, but that doesn't happen to be the case, probably because of the nature of some of the businesses that I've been involved in. I do have some women, Linda Resnick being an example and a few other notable examples. But it's really, the men who were my main clients at Urban Angler, these were guys who were successes in whatever they did, whether they were a fashion photographer or they worked on Wall Street or they were an environmentalist. 

They were the type of people that were the success stories of their industries. And one of the things I noticed about them through years of interacting with them at the business is that they were the farthest thing from perfectionists. They were very happy to not allow good to get in the way of perfect, as you might have heard people say before. And that really helped me distance myself from those kind of everyday tiny details of the business that I should have been farming out in the first place. >> I really appreciate that revelation, too. And I think, while certainly as women we always look to find strong female role models, especially to connect with the other women in our life, very often our mentors will be a man or a woman. And I certainly know that I've had that same experience. You know, Alyssa asked a question that is a bit similar to this, but I'm going to watch for additional hands for any final questions, but my final question to you would be, how do you see service translating in your life in the future given the fact that it is so important to you and you've really built this business around it? >> I have built this business around and I don't want to pretend in any way that my business is not a for-profit entity. Black Umbrella is, you know, it's a for-profit business. We're there to make money, but the service component is, I mean, I think it's interwoven into how all of us live our everyday lives and it's certainly interwoven into how you run your business. 

So service can be giving away your services to a family that needs you. I'll give you an example. We had a family that I knew that was involved with a terrible fire in their apartment building. They needed to evacuate. They left with nothing. And they needed to get completely reestablished. And that's not a point in their life where they can afford to be buying our services, but it's a point in their life where they're realizing all of a sudden how necessary they are. So being able to give them our services as a pro bono effort on our part feels really good, feels really valuable because these are people that needs that so much. But service extends into how you treat your employees, how you street your vendors. How you make the everyday decisions that you make in the business. 

So, for instance, we come in contact with so much sensitive information about our clients through this process and obviously our clients are aware that we would never sell or trade that information. But they're aware of that not just we say it explicitly but because of how our specialists interact with them and operate in the home. So I think service, it kind of seeps in to all these little cracks and crevasses and you feel it from the business, as you have something to do with it. I mean, all of us, you've probably all been in a restaurant, walked into a restaurant where you can tell everyone hates working there. You can tell the boss is a jerk because of how everybody's acting. So the hope is that doing the right thing from the top and on down permeates and gives customers that great feeling. >> Hi, my name is Tyler. I was wondering, your entrepreneurial pursuits really range a wide variety of markets from retail to emergency preparedness. How did your interest and educational background kind of play into that and how did you tie them altogether and take these different steps in these different businesses? >> I love that question, because there's no good answer so I have to think of something new every time someone asks it. Sometimes when we look, I'm not that old. 

I'm 38. But sometimes when you look back through time, it's much easier to see that red thread than it was as you were kind of moving through all those steps. So I went to Bryn Mawr College and my area of focus was urban planning. And I didn't think I was ever going to be an urban planner, I was just fascinated with urban planning. And I really enjoyed it. And then when I went to my first conference of emergency managers for Black Umbrella, everyone there was an urban planner. And I realized that this set of interests had kind of followed me throughout my career, even though I wasn't particularly focused on it all that time. So one of the things that made my fishing business, made Urban Angler a big success was the amount of kind of conversation and cross pollination that happened between the clients when they came into the store. So you might have 15 or 20 different people in the store at any given time from all the walks of life, and yet they all had this common passion. So there was kind of a coffee house atmosphere and there was a lot of conversation and relationships being formed and people that never knew each other or lived in other parts of the world meeting in Alaska and going fishing together because they had met at Urban Angler. 

I love that. I love that excitement and energy of people connecting. And that has to do with urban planning. And it certainly has to do with the psychology and the sentiment that comes out of disaster recovery. So I lived in New York after 9/11 and the spirit and the energy of people connecting to one another at that time really shared, and had some commonalities there. >> Any final questions for Catherine? Well, I know the students join me in thanking you so very much for traveling in from New York to be with us today. And you're always welcome back here in Wisconsin. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you, thank you. 

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