Business Opportunities Weblog

July 20, 2007 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

StartUp Journal:

For Lindsay Holt, starting a business two years ago with her new husband already has paid off in an end run around maternal guilt.

For years, as a single mom working for a catalog company in the San Francisco Bay area, she used to leave for work before her daughter Danni, then in middle school, was awake. Holt helped Danni get moving in the morning by phone from the ferry as she commuted.

“That was just gut-wrenching,” Holt recalled.

It was on the sidelines of one of Danni’s soccer games that Holt was inspired to start the business that now allows her to make breakfast for her daughter and drive her to school. At the matches, Lindsay and her husband Tate noticed mothers complaining about having to run back home to fetch jerseys, shin guards and other items the kids forgot to pack.

After six months of research and patent searches, they launched Nagtags, electronic checklists that kids can attach to sports bags and backpacks. They put in $50,000 of their own money, excluding salary sacrifices, and raised about $575,000 from investors since incorporating in mid-2005.

Their family is in good company. About half of all U.S. businesses are home-based. Two-thirds of new businesses with at least one employee survive at least two years, and 44% survive at least four years, according to the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy.

Photo by NagTags,Inc..

In Startup, Success, Work at Home | 1 Comment