Small Business Success Stories

Meet the Entrepreneurs of the Year
The Oscars for business. That's how Selim Bassoul, president and CEO of food-service equipment maker Middleby (MIDD) describes Ernst & Young's annual Entrepreneur of ...
October 13, 2009
Meet the Celebrity Gardener
Asafumi Yamashita runs his fingers delicately through a bushy green tomato vine, plucking handfuls of blueberry-sized fruit. The bright red micro-tomatoes, bursting ...
September 11, 2009
A Conversation with Savile Row Tailor Richard Anderson
London's Savile Row is famous for its independent tailoring shops that have been selling bespoke men's clothing along the short street since 1623. But in an era of ...
May 19, 2009
Who Are the Richest People in Town?
Have you ever wondered who the richest man in town is? W. Randall Jones has. The former magazine executive found himself in a country club near his hometown of ...
May 12, 2009
America's Long-Running Restaurants
Good food, great atmosphere, spectacular location. Even if you have all three, opening and running an eatery remains an exceedingly risky venture. Indeed, by most ...
May 8, 2009
Riding Out the Recession With Repairs
Last year the management at Shelly Investments, which owns a pair of car dealerships and an auto repair service, Spectrum Collision, in Irvine, Calif., worried that ...
February 10, 2009
What I Learned in the Trenches
After 13 years in the Marine Corps, Brian Iglesias was ready to embark on a dream career in filmmaking. Prepared to pay his dues, he worked the phones, sent e-mails, ...
February 6, 2009
For Some Small Businesses, Recession Is Good News
The current economic picture is certainly a gloomy one, with massive layoffs, bankruptcies, the collapse of financial institutions, and a severe credit crunch. But the...
December 19, 2008
Venture Capital's Favorite Startups
Over the past four quarters—even as the depths of the nation's economic problems became evident—venture capitalists invested more than $7 billion in seed ...
October 31, 2008
Why Small Manufacturers Are Going Green
As a maker of conveyor systems for manufacturers, Shuttleworth always changed with the times. The 100-employee Huntington (Ind.) company's strong business in ...
October 24, 2008
Talking to Mario Batali
As the owner of 14 restaurants, the author of six cookbooks, and a familiar presence on several TV shows, Mario Batali has entered the rarefied ranks of what is known ...
October 17, 2008
Learning from the Great Depression
At 179 years old, Yuengling remains the country's oldest beer maker. Dick Yuengling, the fifth-generation CEO, says the family kept the business afloat by diversifying...
September 30, 2008
The Last Typewriter Repairman?
Every business day, as he has done for the past 49 years, Paul Schweitzer, 69, travels the streets and skyscrapers of Manhattan making "house" calls, carrying his ...
September 5, 2008
Gene Simmons: Rock 'n' Roll Entrepreneur
As the fire-spitting front man for the rock band KISS, Gene Simmons has put on his kabuki make-up and donned his platform dragon boots for the past 35 years. But for ...
July 16, 2008
From Real Estate Developer to Pizza Man
Wearing shorts, t-shirt, and baseball cap, real estate developer Jim McGown is kneading balls of handmade dough, tossing them in the air, catching them, then shaping ...
June 13, 2008
Dad: An Entrepreneur's Secret to Success
Entrepreneurs often get a helping hand from their parents. In honor of Father's Day, we asked successful business owners how their fathers helped them succeed in ...
June 11, 2008
A Health-Care Entrepreneur-Turned-Farmer
Rain is coming, and Stephen Tiwald and his son are in a bind. The $30,000 tractor they got to speed up production on their Midwest minifarm has instead brought work to...
May 14, 2008
Centuries-Old Family Businesses Share Their Secrets
In 2000, a few members of the Lyman family moved out of its capacious ancestral home. Though the house, set on a sprawling farm in Middlefield, Conn., had been ...
May 12, 2008
From Junkie to Software Success
Bob Williamson fled a broken home in Mississippi at age 17 to hitchhike around the country. He landed in Atlanta in 1970 at 24, homeless, broke, and addicted to heroin...
May 8, 2008
Mom: An Entrepreneur's Secret to Success
Richard Branson's parents told him to never criticize anyone. He still tries to apply that rule at Virgin Group. When Bobbi Brown was struggling to decide what to do ...
March 14, 2008
An Entrepreneurial Path to Peace
About five years ago, Stef Wertheimer came across Gamila Hiar, a Druze woman with no formal education who had learned the ancient art of making soap from wild herbs ...
March 14, 2008
Who Is Stef Wertheimer?
Early on, Stef Wertheimer, the founder of Iscar Metalworking, a manufacturer of industrial precision metal-cutting tools, decided that entrepreneurship was an answer ...
January 16, 2008
Israel's Winemaking Revolution
The Golan Heights Winery vineyards climb from the Sea of Galilee to snow-capped Mount Hermon near Israel's border with Lebanon and Syria. A picturesque region of ...
January 14, 2008
Restaurateurs Don't Just Wing It
Jordan Busch and Sara Sawicki are the co-owners of Fire on the Mountain Buffalo Wings, a bustling wing joint in Portland, Ore., which has been embraced as a local ...
October 5, 2007
Business Courses Give Kids a Leg Up
When she was a 17-year-old student at Mt. Carmel High School in Derby, Kan., Abby Lewis developed a business plan for the Scribbler, a nail polish applicator that ...
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