Despite being a second-year law student, Richard Komaiko has abandoned the idea of practicing law in favor of starting a business.
Komaiko and his three business partners recognized the soft legal market was hurting not only law school graduates who can’t find jobs, but also solo practitioners and small legal firms challenged to find paying clients.
The result is TheLawyerMarket.com, launched six weeks ago to help consumers find attorneys. The site already has drawn more than 3,000 visitors and has signed up 100 lawyers, who pay $30 to the Web site when a user chooses them.
“We’re trying to provide a marketplace,” Komaiko said, so lawyers don’t have to spend as much time looking for clients, which ultimately pushes up their fees.
By tapping the dean of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law and the head of IIT’s entrepreneurship center for advice, Komaiko and his partners have perfected their business presentation, avoided some rookie errors and kept costs low.
“There’s a case to be made for starting a business while you’re in school,” said Nik Rokop, managing director of IIT’s Knapp Entrepreneurship Center. “The university can provide resources that students on their own don’t always have available.”
These days, all kinds of students are choosing entrepreneurial paths, as high unemployment and the lack of long-term job security have convinced many that they are better off building their own businesses.
“The job market is tough. Where it would be, ‘Go get a job,’ students don’t have as many options these days,” said April Lane, associate director at the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at DePaul University, which has worked with 100 student entrepreneurs this year.
While a student in the executive MBA program at the University of Chicago,
started
, an online payment provider that started in 2007. By participating in the university’s New Venture Challenge competition, he worked with professors and mentors for months.
“They helped me refine my thought process,” he said.
Since then, Braintree has seen revenue grow 500 percent annually and now employs 20 workers, Johnson said.
At Northwestern University, Mike Casper took a leave of absence this spring from the Kellogg School of Management when demand accelerated for his company’s consumer electronics display technology. FLEx Lighting uses LED technology and thin plastic film to provide lighting for e-books and edgeless televisions, Casper said. The company is working with manufacturers on products to be released in 2011.
“There’s a huge opportunity to reduce the thickness and cost of LED television, which we’re able to do,” he said.
Not all student innovation is high-tech. Brian Taylor came up with the concept for Kernel Season’s while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, but advanced his popcorn-seasoning business as an MBA student at the University of Chicago.
“My business has more than doubled since I’ve been in school,” he said. He brought manufacturing in-house and employs 50 workers, up from 10 when he started the MBA program in 2006.
At age 16, Ryan Lewis is doing his own bottling. So far, he has sold 900 bottles of Jeff Dranks homemade lemonade at $3 each.
“I wouldn’t have even thought about doing anything like this” before participating in the Future Founders program, Lewis said.
Lewis won the audience favorite award at Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center’s fifth annual Future Founders business plan competition, held last week. Thanks to mentors who helped him fine-tune his business plan, Lewis said, he has made about $3,000 from the business, and he is saving that money for college.
Throughout the year, the program sends more than 100 mentors from the business community to work with 160 students at five Chicago high schools, “because you learn from others,” said David Weinstein, the center’s president.
“If we do not create the next generation of business leaders, we are in deep trouble,” Weinstein said.
This year’s Future Founders winner was Morgan Brock, whose business, FBC Manufacturing, sells a patented washcloth invented by her family in 2000. Since taking the business class offered by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship at Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, Brock said, sales have been growing.
She hopes to continue the business as she studies at Purdue University in the fall. “I want to see my business flourish.”
