When Diana Jaramillo looked around at the many entrepreneurs she met at a WISE symposium, she thought, "These people are amazing. But that's not me." However, a couple of years later, with her daughter starting school and her full-time job unable to provide the flexibility she needed...

Donna Glassberg founded OrangeHousing.com in 1997 as a way for area students to find housing, and her business is still going strong 23 years on. Part of what's fueled her on-going success is her ability to tap local resources, including WISE WBC, and her commitment to self-development.

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Kerry Heckman, owner of Knitty Gritty Yarns, decided to leave her career in higher education to build something of her own. She spent a year researching, finding resources, and honing her business idea, and, in doing so, came across WISE WBC. Through one-on-one business counseling, Kerry created a business plan that, when she shopped it around to banks, said it was one of the best they'd ever seen.

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Seema Sureshkumar works at Syracuse University as a database administrator, and, on the side, runs a dance academy which is highly technical in its own way. Indian dance has a curriculum just like traditional school, and, every year, dance students take an exam and must pass before moving on to the next level. Many students study for 10 years or more.

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Claire McKenney, an artist with a gift for connecting people through creative projects, decided to go it on her own after a few years working with PaintNite, based in Boston. "I always told people who said they weren't creative that they just hadn't found their thing yet. I started thinking about how to offer a bigger variety of those creative projects."

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When she was living in Virginia, Eileen Collins helped an entrepreneur friend organize her paperwork and create systems to stay on top of it. Eileen did such a good job that her friend encouraged her to start a business out of it. She did, and Admin-On-Call was born in 1999. Working nights and weekends to help support her sister's Consignment Boutique, Eileen eventually stepped into her business full time when she moved to Syracuse and left her corporate job in 2012.

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