Our city is home to so many incredible businesses and so we asked the founders how they came up with the ideas for their businesses and have shared their responses below.

Lauren Stickney | Integrative Nutrition Health Coach

My business was inspired by my own health journey. For the longest time, I was a yo-yo dieter and exerciser, chasing pounds on the scale and hungry for happiness. Through finding the right foods, exercise, and lifestyle for me and my body, I realized how easy it could be to find a healthy balance. It led to me going back to school to study nutrition, leaving my job in insurance sales, and now helping women find their own sense of balance through health. Read more>>

Dana Williams | CEO of The Queens Project

I was inspired by own experience and overcoming homelessness. It wasn’t until I was on my own that I felt isolated, helpless, and hopeless until there was someone who showed me the ways of transition. I experience a short stint of homelessness after college and even in school I was led to assist those who were unsheltered and underprivileged. It started with a school project and after my own experience fueled a purposeful non profit organization named the Queens Project whose core mission is to alleviate world hunger and poverty while providing transitional services to the underserved and unsheltered in communities worldwide. Read more>>

Jamie Cox | Baker

I’ve always enjoyed baking and creating. As a child I would use my mothers red Betty Crocker cook book and scroll through the pages while she was working to see what I could put together. She’d not always come home to something amazing as planned. As time passed I baked for myself, family and friends, but never anything more than that. We would have weekly Shabbat at my brothers home and I was in charge of dessert. That gave me a weekly challenge of something to come up with to share and a large gathering of friends and family to experiment on. At this point I decided to focus on gluten free specifically for several people that were intolerant. I set out on this task with the mindset of, I will create amazing things that are gluten free, as you know it doesn’t have a good reputation and surely didn’t 10 years ago. Read more>>