They Took A Chance, Found A Niche

Star Tribune:

Jobless after the dot-com bust, friends Gillett Cole and Jim Myers pooled energies and earnings from a summer job to create their company, Twin Cities Closet Co., which provides creative ways to use storage space.

Deposit check in hand, Twin Cities Closet Co. founders Jim Myers and Gillett Cole celebrated their first order — until they realized they weren’t quite officially in business. Not without an office, a workshop or even a single tool to their name.

Cole and Myers now concede, almost seven years later, that theirs might not have been a textbook case. Without deep pockets or even jobs to fall back on, thanks to the dot-com bust, they didn’t have time to go by the book.

“We were unemployed,” Cole said. “I had a newborn. I had to put food on the table. We didn’t have the time to do all this market research. People have homes, they have closets, that’s all we needed to know. Sometimes you’ve just got to have the willingness to take the risk.”

“Those are the chances you take as an entrepreneur,” Myers said. “If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. At the time we were like, ‘Just make it happen.’ Failure was not an option.”

Read more.

Photo by Bruce Bisping.

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