How WA small-business owners ditched the 9-5 and became their own boss

YOU CAN DREAM, can’t you?

In June 2022, Gerald and Alma Patriarca, of SeaTac, took the plunge to start a new life.

He’s now 38. She’s 42.

Alma had worked as an assistant manager at Wendy’s for 11 years, then stayed home during the first five years after the birth of their son, James, now 8.

Gerald had various jobs, including handling legal notices and paid obituaries at The Seattle Times. His latest job was at a call center for a vehicle manufacturer.

“Now is the time,” they decided then.

They were young enough, certainly motivated enough. Yes: They’d start a business of their own. It would be an auto detailing shop.

They joined a record-high number of others who’ve decided to ditch working for someone else.

Apprehensions?

“A lot,” says Gerald. “There were so many questions that went through my mind, like how are we going to get money, how are we going to pay our mortgage, and what happens if we can’t pay our rent at our shop?”

But a common thread among those I interviewed about starting a small business is their optimism. They really do believe we’re a country in which you can follow your dream.

In the United States, small businesses make up 99.9% of all enterprises, with 80% of all businesses employing fewer than 10 workers, according to U. S. Census Bureau figures.

The census also shows that in 2023, nationwide, there was a record number of 5.5 million business applications. In Washington state, 2023 also saw a record-high 98,000 business applications.

A January 2024 paper in the Harvard Business Review had this explanation: “ … the months after the pandemic hit were a period of social disruption the likes of which the country hadn’t seen in decades. Becoming an entrepreneur is a deeply personal decision, and the early pandemic precipitated a great deal of introspection and re-evaluation of work and life. It’s a testament to something deeply ingrained in American culture that, confronted with all that 2020 threw at us, so many people chose entrepreneurship.”

WELL, NOT EVERYBODY.

When I asked readers to share their small-business stories, Steve Healy, 72, of Covington, offered this. I think he speaks for a good many: “I have been encouraged in years gone by to start an electrical contracting business. ‘You are a good electrician; why don’t you go into business for yourself?’ was always the question,” he says.

“A friend who did go that route pointed out that he worked 20 hours a week with the tools and 20 hours a week with pen and pencil doing the business side. A fellow I worked for to build a successful electrical contracting firm worked seven days a week for a dozen years or more.”

No thanks, says Healy.

“I’ve been retired 12 years and have a very comfortable pension. I never had the headaches or the heartaches they experienced. I never had that kind of ambition.”

GERALD HAD BEEN thinking about the auto detailing idea for a while.

When he worked at The Times, he says, “I commuted to the Denny office with a carpool. I wanted to make sure our car was always presentable, so I detailed it once per week, rain or shine.”

He picked up skills. “I learned how to polish, wax, wash, decontaminate, clean and condition leather.”

His fellow carpoolers complimented him. His neighbors wondered in awe at his spotless 2012 Hyundai Accent, saying he should do it as a business.

By then, Gerald had grown disenchanted with his last corporate job.

During COVID in 2020, he worked from home in customer service. Alma sat next to him, learning the computer programs he used. When there was an opening in his team, Alma applied. She was turned down. Then, says Gerald, when a lead position was available on his team, he applied for that position. He was turned down.

Time to go on their own.

JAG’s Auto Detail, combining the initials of the first names of their little family — James, Alma and Gerald — was born.

They found a space in an industrial park near Westfield Southcenter, figuring customers could go shopping while waiting for their cars. Gerald’s parents helped with James, taking him to school.

They learned about using Facebook to boost traffic to their website. It was $20 for 500 impressions, meaning the number of times their ad was displayed. Even at that small cost, the couple decided it wasn’t working.

What did work was word-of-mouth. Among their first customers was the property manager for the industrial park. That turned into a booking for one of his co-workers.

Gerald and Alma reached out to friends and former co-workers, including driving them to work so they could leave their car for a day. “There were instances when we didn’t think we could make that month’s rent,” says Gerald. “I went looking for part-time work at retail stores.”

Gerald joined the Rotary Club of SeaTac-Tukwila and the Seattle Southside Chamber of Commerce. You start a business, you need to network.

“You’re always working. You carry a business card wherever you go. Yesterday, I went to the dentist, and there was a new hygienist.” They went outside and took a look at her car. New customer.

One recent day, the couple was detailing a black Ford E-250 cargo van used to transport deceased to a funeral home. It was methodical work, with buffers, rags, industrial cleaners. The couple works while listening to 95.7 The Jet, which mostly plays ’80s music, and sometimes a podcast.

So far, Gerald and Alma have beaten the odds.

Around 20% of new businesses close in the first year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That failure rate jumps to 50% at the five-year mark.

If your business gets to its 10th birthday, that’s quite an accomplishment. By then, 65% of your fellow entrepreneurs have shuttered.

AMBITION IS WHAT Tonyia Smith, 54, a 1987 Garfield High School grad, has in surplus.

She started her first business at age 21. It was an espresso cart near Seattle Center, right across from the KOMO Plaza. She didn’t even drink coffee at the time.

“I just knew Seattleites loved coffee,” she says.

Smith remembers, “I had no business connections or network at 21.”

She sold the business a few years later. She was a single mom with a daughter and son, and the stand and its hours proved too much.

She became a mortgage loan officer. This was during the mid-2000s, the go-go housing years with subprime loans. For Smith, it didn’t feel right.

Her mom, Lois Mackey, of Seattle, urged her to find a new career.

Smith loved cooking and baking, and decided to enroll in the pastry program at the Seattle Culinary Academy at Seattle Central College.

“My life had found a purpose,” she says.

One of the assignments at the academy was to bake a gluten-free product.

Gluten what?

Smith learned about Celiac Disease, an immune reaction to protein found in wheat, barley or rye. Smith sees potential all around, and decided that what was needed was a gluten-free bakery.

In 2012, she opened a 400-square-foot shop on the Western Avenue stretch of Pike Place Market. It was called the Silver Slice Bakery.

“I had a little nest egg, my mom contributed some money and Pike Place Market contributed some improvements,” says Smith.

She asked her mom for advice on running the business. Mackey remembers, “She was stumbling around asking me things I didn’t know about.”

Mackey was familiar with SCORE Greater Seattle, the federally funded nonprofit for startups and ongoing companies. For free, the group provides mentors with business experience, and other help. Smith signed up.

Her first mentor, Bernard Bossom, founded a national commercial real estate finance brokerage. He helped Smith with some basic business math.

She says, “I projected that I’d sell 10 whole cakes per week at $50 each. We revised the plan to sell cake slices at $7 each, with each whole cake having 12 slices, for a total of $84 a cake. It made so much sense because more people would buy a cake slice daily and not the whole cake.”

Smith soon was dealing with the Pike Place Market Historical Commission. “We had to get approvals for the color of paint, tile, flooring, lighting and even the door knobs,” she says.

Her shop bounced around various locations, eventually ending up in a Federal Way shopping mall. Smith found out what happens when big box retailers decide to abandon a mall. “It left us in a dead zone.”

Smith decided to call it quits and sold the bakery equipment. That was in 2017.

She kept in touch with Bossom, who urged her to give it another try.

Smith returned to the business, this time with a new mentor who was familiar with scaling and production. That is her current SCORE mentor, Suvendoo Ray, retired from Boeing in international sales.

He told Smith she had been juggling too many bakery projects. “You have to prioritize,” Ray told her. He explained, “She had a limited resource, and that was her time.”

So Smith and her Silver Slice Bakery are back at it.

At night, she leases space in the kitchen of a Maple Valley juice bar when that shop is closed. If the orders are big enough, she works all night. She’s helped by her two grown children, daughter Imani Siu-Chang, 34, and son Najee Siu-Chang, 32. 

In the mornings, Smith delivers baked goods herself, including to Hyatt hotels in the Seattle area.

She’s developed a gluten-free, plant-based pizza and is getting ready to market it. It is spinach-based and called “Spizza.” To promote it, through a licensing agent, Smith contacted King Features for use of the Popeye cartoon characters. It is Popeye the Sailor Man who gets his strength from downing a can of spinach.

Smith is back on track.

“My family are some proud folks. We have an ‘Is that all ya got?’ attitude when faced with adversity,” she says.

CHRIS OWN, 44, is a techie with a pretty remarkable achievement.

His startup business designed and manufactured what he says is the smallest electron microscope in the world. 

Electron microscopes can reach 8 feet high, and weigh 2,000 pounds, costing $1 million and upward. You find them in major laboratories that can afford the cost.

Own’s comes in a metal box that’s 8x8x10 inches, weighs only 6 pounds and sells for $65,000. “This is a democratization product,” he says. “It gives the power of the electron microscope to people outside of the lab.”

His revolutionary microscope is called Mochii, after the Japanese rice sweet. Own wanted to stand out from the massive scanning electron microscopes with names such as Titan.

The company that Own started is called Voxa. Techies would understand what the name references: Voxel is a term used in 3-D computer graphics.

Mochii’s size is also why NASA awarded Own’s company $461,000 in 2017 to further develop the microscope to use in the space station. Everything there needs to be compact. NASA was interested in using Mochii to help with incidents such as one that took place in the space station in 2013.

A crew member detected a water leak buildup in his suit. This meant no going outside the space station for 11 months until the problem was figured out when the suit was returned to Earth. An investigation found aluminum silicate contamination in the suit’s filter. The compact Mochii could have figured that out on board.

In January 2022, a flight engineer on the International Space Station tested the machine in outer space. It worked. Now it’s part of the space station.

As a scanning electron microscope, Mochii is different from a regular microscope relying on visible light. Instead, it focuses electrons onto an object, and then collects and converts those electrons into an image.

The Mochii provides 100 times more detail than a regular microscope.

Take diatomaceous earth, the common powder used in everything from aquarium filters to insecticide powders. It’s with an electron microscope that you see that this powder is really billions of skeletons of single-celled marine algae.

The garage where Mochii was assembled is at Own’s parents’ home in Bothell. Some of the work also is done at Own’s home in Shoreline. 

He says parts for the microscope are bought from other manufacturers; the research can be done on computers at home, which is what some of his 12 employees do.

Own distinctly remembers his start at entrepreneurship. He was in high school and was a pretty good violin player. His violin teacher in Wichita Falls, Texas, told him there was good money to be made playing gigs at weddings and other events for wealthier patrons.

“I remember I was making $500 for a few hours,” he says. “I realized I never have to work for anybody else. I could work for myself.”

He was born in Taiwan and came to the United States with his mom to join their dad, Shi-Hau Own, who was working as a material sciences engineer. Own followed his dad’s path and studied materials physics. At Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., he did graduate research in electron microscopy. It was while earning his Ph.D. around 2001 that Own started his first company.

“What excited me was tool building,” he says.

In this case, it was a tool that converted the colder digital sound of CDs to the warmer analog sound of vinyl records. Through word-of-mouth, over five years, Own sold 1,000 of the converters, which cost him $200 to $300 each to make, for $800 each. That’s half-a-million dollars profit.

“I bought a house with the money,” he says. By then, he had moved to Seattle.

Own did other work with complicated scientific instruments until, in 2012, he decided to found Voxa. With his initial small team, “to keep the lights on,” they took on consulting jobs, sold used equipment and built small gadgets for other tech companies.

Own figured he needed around $250,000 to launch his business.

“I had a couple of small loans, leveraged credit card debt and personally funded it from my savings,” he says. “And I had a few angel investors.” It helped that his wife, Lindsey Own, is a teacher. “A steady job.”

He also got funding from a federal program that supports new technology.

“We had great challenges with the U.S. government,” says Own. “Filling the paperwork correctly is daunting for a new minted small company. Being a technical founder only makes the situation more difficult, as one’s brain is wired very differently than a bureaucrat’s.”

The funding eventually came through.

Own is happy. His company, his vision.

He says, “A wise adviser once told me that every successful business founder he knew seemed to be someone who was effectively unemployable.”