Back of the Napkin: Entrepreneurs Share Stories of Their Big Journeys in Small Busines‪s‬ The SurePayroll Team

Pete Leonard is a serial entrepreneur whose latest business venture pairs high-quality coffee with a mission to hire post-prison people. I Have a Bean is a coffee roasting company in Wheaton, IL that roasts high-quality coffee beans. Inspired by a personal situation, Pete decided his employees were going to be post-prison people and has set them up for success.
In our chat with Pete, he explained more about the inspiration behind I Have a Bean, the business planning that went into this, and his lessons learned along the way running multiple small businesses.

In this Friday Fail, Maria Erna, owner of WaG Grooming Salon and Spa, shares a fail she had early in her career. When she was 18, Maria had an event planning business. Her fail was brutal, but she learned an important lesson in moving forward amidst failure in business and learned how important resilience is when running a small business.

Inspired by their own struggles with wedding planning, Manali Shah and Raj Kamaria launched Pyaari Weddings in early 2020. Pyaari Weddings is a wedding planning website that helps users plan a wedding in five minutes. The couple quickly learned how time-consuming and complicated the wedding planning process can be and Pyaari Weddings makes it easy for couples to plan their whole wedding without needing to work with a wedding planner or spend hours contacting vendors. This is the first small business venture for the couple.
In this episode, Manali and Raj share more about how they got Pyaari Weddings up and running, the lessons they've learned along the way while running their business, and how they are enjoying the small business journey.

Failing in business is never fun, but those fails have the power to inspire big success. In this short episode of Back of the Napkin, we talked to Lee Kitchen, creative guru and inspiration consultant, in Orlando, FL about failure. Failure plays a big role in Lee's creative brainstorms, and he wants his participants to embrace failure and learn from those setbacks. In this episode, Lee shares a story about a time he had a major failure at work, what he learned from that experience, and what he wants to remind others about learning from failure.

Maria Erna is the owner of WaG Grooming Salon and Spa in Salem, NH. Inspired by her own struggles to find quality dog grooming for her dogs, Maria opened WaG to provide a holistic, dog spa, salon experience to her furry clientele. Maria has worked in a variety of industries and is a marketing consultant for small business owners to help them succeed and reach their full business potential.
In our time with Maria, we talked about why a holistic dog grooming experience is important, supporting employees and trusting them to do the job they were hired for, her full journey in small business, and advice for other small business owners.  

Lee Kitchen is a brainstorming facilitator in the Orlando, Florida area who arms businesses across the country with tools to inspire creativity and launch new ideas. Following a more than 30-year career with The Walt Disney Company, Lee focused on his new small business and learned that many people struggle with creativity in business. He has several workshop styles with a variety of exercises that are designed to get people out of their comfort zones and embrace creativity.
On this episode of Back of the Napkin, Lee shares what he learned in his time with the Walt Disney Company, what his small business journey has been like, and tips for how small business can boost creativity in entrepreneurship.