In the middle of the dot-com boom, Tarnopolsky said he aspired to be like Sky Dayton, the prototypical dot-com whiz kid and founder of EarthLink, the second-largest Internet provider in the US. His new heroes? Debbi Fields, who started Fields Cookies from a counter in Palo Alto, California, and Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks.
"He successfully marketed and branded something that's been around for a long time," Tarnopolsky said. "I think the same thing can happen with crepes."
According to Po Bronson, an author who chronicled the technology boom and who profiled 75 people contemplating their careers for his upcoming book, What Should I Do With My Life? (Random House), for all the talk of scaling back, today's entrepreneurs have not given up entirely on the dot-com ethos.
"They come to it with the notion that the Internet may be dead but a lot of the values they believe in are the same," Bronson said.
"They believe they can become an expert in something quickly, that brains might be better than experience, that most companies don't push hard enough. But the biggest is, `Life had meaning, and I was juiced when I took risk.'
"I've seen a lot people say, `I'm going to find that same thing somewhere else, maybe not in the Internet but with a hot dog stand.'"
If there's a thrill to be found in staring failure in the face, then small-business owners will have no shortage of excitement. According to the Small Business Administration, less than half of new businesses survive more than four years.
For this reason, perhaps, the budding capitalists have encountered plenty of skepticism from family and friends. Benavidez approached several business school classmates about investing in his hot dog stand, for example, and was turned down by all of them.
"They'd said they got so burned investing in their friends' tech companies that they were tapped out or just too hesitant," he said.
And the new business owners aren't past having their own doubts.
"I've vacillated between thinking I was an absolute genius and the village idiot," Tarnopolsky said. "I feel a lot of pressure to succeed. This business is all wrapped up in me and my identity."
When that pressure builds, new entrepreneurs seem to fall back on the same MBA training they used to fuel growth in the dot-com sector. After a few days of feeling good about his hot dog epiphany, Benavidez "went into business-school mode," he said.
He researched the margins of the hot dog market and analyzed neighborhood foot-traffic patterns, going so far as to count the number of customers going into local restaurants at certain hours.
He used unwitting friends as market testers, serving them homemade relishes and mustards at a Super Bowl party and noting their preferences.
And he dashed off a four-page business plan -- about 75 pages shorter than the average business plan he toted around during the boom -- that led to a US$50,000 investment by family and friends.
Benavidez added US$40,000 of his own money ("Everything I have," he said) and early next month he will open his stand on North Fifth Street and Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. He named the place after his dog: "Sparky's American Food."
"I'm going to be the one slopping chili on hot dogs and cooking burgers," Benavidez said. "The sky's the limit if we do things right. But my main goal, is, Please make this little shop work."
RSS