Small-Business Know-How Valuable
Helping her entrepreneurial father as a youngster paid off later in life for Rochelle Boersma.
“He was a plumber and an inventor,” said Boersma of her dad, who started a business when she was 8. “He invented the stainless steel grate that snaps into a floor drain. He started the company in our basement but continued his day job as a plumber until business took off.”
Boersma and her family “would all work together in our basement putting grates into shipping boxes and sending them out,” she recalled. “During dinner, my dad and my mom would challenge us with ideas, such as how we would make a particular marketing plan work or why people would want to buy our product.”
This experience proved valuable when Boersma landed a job at Cellular One, she said.
“My job was working with our third-party distributors, our entrepreneurial arm, primarily small businesses,” Boersma said. “Because I’d helped my parents with their small business, I had a huge sensitivity as to how policy changes at a large company could impact a small business in ways the company might not have considered.”
Boersma, 51, is vice president of Midwest operations at U.S. Cellular, the Chicago-based wireless carrier. Continue reading.
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