FSB/CAS student seizes opportunities to take her art to new frontiers
Lucy Zimmer turned disappointment into opportunity by attending a women in entrepreneurship conference this summer
Lucy Zimmer is working toward degrees in Organizational Leadership and Entrepreneurship at Miami University, but what she really wants to do when she graduates is what she’s already been doing for years – make art.
“I decided that I would rather be in a profession that I love and be my own boss and do that kind of thing than know that I'm going to make a bunch of money in a job that I don't want,” she said.
Zimmer’s art and her business, Lucy Sue’s, can be found at the Oxford Farmer’s Market each week, but she took another big step toward her goal last year by taking ESP 201: Introduction to Entrepreneurship Business Models. The final project of the class is the Business Model Road Test Pitch Competition at the end of the semester.
“When we got into our groups in the class for the pitch competition, we all had to start off by talking about the interests that we have and then create a group based on those interests to then create a business model,” Zimmer said. “I said, ‘I've been thinking about these children's books that I want to do, and this might be a really cool concept to create a business model.’ So, then we took that and ran with it.”
The concept for the group’s books is for each one to look at underrepresented life situations that children find themselves in – single-parent households, food insecurity, or chronic illness, for example – with narratives that don’t portray the protagonists as victims.
“That is very similar to what I'm trying to do, but the difference is that the things I want to do aren't directly about the situations. It's just about a kid that happens to be in that situation,” Zimmer said. “So rather than a book about a little girl who's overweight, she would just happen to be overweight, and it would be about a whole other story, to kind of normalize that in kids’ mindsets.”
Their idea led the team – Zimmer, Abigail Worly, Simona Caruana, Caitlyn Korallus, and Tatiana Fecowycz – to a first-place finish in the pitch competition.
While taking part in ESP 201, Zimmer had heard about a virtual collegiate accelerator program from the Women Business Entrepreneurship National Council (WBENC) and decided to apply. “I wasn’t really thinking I'd get in. I just thought it would be worth my time to apply,” she said. “And then, I got in.”
The program consisted of weekly two-hour Zoom sessions, each led by a woman and featuring a particular aspect of having a business, such as financials or marketing. At the end, 10 women were chosen to be part of a pitch competition at the WBENC National Conference.
Zimmer was not one of the 10 chosen.
“Lucy was really disappointed that she didn't get accepted for that final round, but around the same time, her team actually won the ESP 201 competition,” said Kerri Cissna, professor in Entrepreneurship and the First-Year Integrated Core. “So I talked to her and said, ‘Lucy, let's just go to the national conference anyway, because if we can go, you can see the accelerator and the final presentations, and then next year you can apply again and hopefully you'll get in.’”
Cissna, Zimmer, her ESP 201 team, and Ella Rumpke, another FSB student who had started a business, traveled to New Orleans in late June for the conference, where they got to network with and learn from other women entrepreneurs.
“The conference is also a trade show, and the whole second day of the conference different businesses have tables, where women can sit and have three minutes to pitch them,” Cissna said. “Ella and Lucy, since they each actually have a company, they were actually pitching their own ideas, which was awesome just to get the experience.”
And Zimmer had an even more impactful experience than she expected. Because she had taken part in the virtual accelerator, the conference organizers gave her a table at the conference exposition to show off her business as well as the prototype for the children’s book her class project created.
“I made so many connections and it was probably the best thing I've ever done. I kept an envelope of all the business cards of everyone that I talked to, and I just sent them all thank-you cards with my email, and I've already got people reaching back out to me,” Zimmer said. “I have a call scheduled with a book publisher in August, and I have another meeting set with a lawyer that I met there, and we're talking about her representing me in my business.”
She added, “It was also really inspiring to hear other women that are much older than me have businesses that are thriving, businesses that they started based off of a passion of theirs, which is kind of what I'm doing,” she said. “Getting to hear from those people, hearing what they did to make that happen, gave me a new level of confidence I didn't have before.”
