Nick Cotsilis is the Ice Technician at Jobing.com Arena, where Wayne Gretzsky coaches the Phoenix Coyotes NHL hockey team. He is in his second year with the team.

We put the ice in the day after Labor Day this year. What we do is we try to get the building as cold as possible, right around 56 degrees. We get the concrete to around 10 degrees. Then we lay water out with a golf cart using a spray system. We put a layer of water on the floor, then we start with the white paint. That process takes about two hours just to set it up and have it freeze.

Once the white paint is done we go back to a more clear. After that’s all frozen, we lay the lines down and start painting away. We go with the lines first and then move on to the logos. We use all different kinds of tools and paints. There’s a special paint that we use. There’s some special chemical that they use where you paint it and it freezes right away. I’d say there’s roughly ten colors or so for the different logos that we use.

We started lying water down at noon, and got done around eleven o’clock at night.

It’s the best job in the world. Totally my dream job. For sure. I love interacting with the players and getting good feedback from them. I love doing this job.

At 25, with a degree in mechanical engineering, David Kravetz decided he wanted to sell brownies. David, along with his lifelong friend and business partner Eileen Spitalny, moved to Phoenix, found day jobs, and spent many nights in a friend’s catering kitchen armed only with his mother’s brownie recipe and a disturbing lack of experience. Sixteen years later, David and Eileen’s mail order venture Fairytale Brownies can claim a single day’s sales record of $450,000.

“I just think it’s great to sell brownies,” David says, “It’s a fun product that puts a smile on people’s faces.”

Five years into a ten-year business plan, Fairytale recently moved into a beautiful new facility from which the entire operation is controlled. The Phoenix facility includes a walk-in retail area that contains a viewing window of the actual baking floor, an order processing and shipping center, and plenty of customer service work stations.

Conspicuously lacking, however, are executive private offices. David does his work from the same area as his employees. This, along with full financial disclosure to all employees, maintains the cooperative work atmosphere that makes Fairytale so successful. The $100 Empowerment Policy allows all customer service representatives a budget of $100 to fix a customer’s problem immediately, and it works.

David’s advice for young entrepreneurs is all about patience. “It takes a long time to gain a foothold. We worked for 3 years without a salary, and eight years until the company had a positive net worth.”

That patience has paid off, thanks to calculated risk, trust, and a mother’s fabulous recipe.

We met up with Amy in her Southside Chicago loft, to hear her story of how she made a leap of faith from the security of Corporate America, to the exhilarating yet exhausting world of entrepreneurship. While we devoured the best pound cake known to man, the warm and collected Amy relived the events that led to her following her passion, and the opening of her business Comfort Cake®.

Pound cake is Amy’s favorite dessert, and she has been making it forever. She would bring it to neighborhood bake sales, family dinners, and dinner parties. Her pound cake became an instant favorite with guests, and the ongoing joke became that if Amy couldn’t make the party, then her cake would just have to take her place.

Through her twenty years of marketing experience with companies such as Pillsbury, Gillette, and L’Oreal, Amy could smell a business opportunity when there was one. And with the overwhelming positive response to her pound cake creations, the scent she smelt was stronger than her famous “Awesome Almond” cake fresh out of the oven.

“I’m a marketer by nature, and I said to myself if one more person tells me that I should put this on the market, I’m going to do it. So I brought my cake to a neighborhood block party, and this woman tasted it and turned to me and said “you have a million dollar idea.” I said to myself, that’s it, that was the last one, I’m going to do it. And that’s when I decided to take the plunge and go forward with the idea.”

While she had mentally made the decision to pursue her passion, the fact was that she was still at L’Oreal and spare time was something that was hard to come by. She was heading up a marketing department with twelve people and over a hundred SKU’s, yet still had the desire to open a business for herself and her family. To create the spare time, she hired a consultant to write the business plan, which proved to be much easier for her to edit the plan instead of write it.

The next step was to put a name to the company and its delicious product.

“At a dinner party one Christmas I brought a cake to a friends house, and a lot of my cakes have liquor glazes. Whether it was because I had done too much Christmas shopping that year or whatever, I guess I poured a little more liquor on the cake than usual. So when everyone was eating it they were asking what I put in the cake. They were like “Wow, this is a comfortable cake.” And they just kept saying that over and over, and again, my marketing nature kicked in and I thought to myself “Comfortable Cake. Comfort Cake. Comfort Cake! That’s it!” And that’s how it was born.”

While Amy was getting everything in order with Comfort Cake®, she was still at L’Oreal where she was faced with a career decision. She was given the opportunity to move up in the company by heading up the marketing for a certain division where she would continue to travel the world, grow with the products, and have the possibility of becoming president one day.

But Amy couldn’t do it. It quite simply wasn’t what she wanted to do. She was traveling too much as it was, she had two children at home, and figured that it was time to live her passion and not create new products for someone else. She said to herself that for once, she was going to launch a product for herself and her family and decided that now was the time to do it. So she resigned at the end of 2000, incorporated Comfort Cake® on February 15, 2001, and is celebrating her five year anniversary in 2006.

The first year of business proved to be a true test for Comfort Cake®. Through a prior business connection, Amy had established their first prospective customer in United Airlines, and Comfort Cake® proceeded to vigorously pursue this lead. They were given a proposal by United to have Comfort Cake® samples. The order sent Amy and her team scrambling to design a logo, find a kitchen to cook out of and produce samples of the delicious pound cake…all in a thirty day span!

Her team somehow threw everything together and pitched it all to United. United sampled some of her pound cake, and a few days later they phoned Amy to tell her they wanted Comfort Cake® to supply their deserts. As Amy learned United wanted 500,000 deserts over the phone, her high spirits and overwhelming excitement led her to accidentally hang up on her first customer without gathering any details to arrange the order! She quickly realized her mistake, hurriedly punched the digits back into her phone, and professionally worked out the necessary details. She was in business!

Now if we add up everything, you might be able to see where the story is headed. Amy started her business in early 2001, and booked United Airlines as a customer in the middle of 2001 for a substantial amount of orders. In August of 2001, Amy took a complete leap of faith by selling her home in order to gsin capital enough to produce the United deserts. She was unable to find a bank that would loan her money despite the enormous United order. And then, less than a month later, the United planes went down on September 11th.

Fearing the worst, Amy figured that the order would be cancelled for sure when she talked to United. And why wouldn’t they? They were dealing with the most drastic event of our time and fighting off financial troubles in a struggling economy. But the ironic part of the story here is that the name Amy created for her product at a Christmas party was also the saving grace for United. With such a frightening time for customers, United said that they thought it would be great to have her deserts on board because the word “comfort” on the box helped relieve the anxiety passengers faced when flying. They decided to not only keep her order, but to include the deserts on other flights as well. The experience taught Amy that nothing would phase her within the entrepreneurial adventure of Comfort Cake®, and that nothing is impossible.

Since 2001, Amy has led Comfort Cake® in the right direction. With the help of her longtime partner CJ, they have grown the business to handle the amount of high volume orders they receive while catering to their corporate clients, like United. The delicious taste of her cakes have garnered national attention from publications, ranging from Ebony to Entrepreneur. Also, the freedom of doing business for herself has allowed Amy to focus on the personal things that matter most, like raising her two children. Because Amy pursued her passion, it is safe to say that she found a “comfort in the cake”.

In her spare time, Amy often talks to students and offers guidance to those who wish to receive. Here is what she offered to us when we asked what she usually tells students:

“You are born knowing what your passion is, but you sometimes don’t recognize it. I tell anyone to look at what you love to do, that you would do for free….because those are the things that are inbred in your DNA that you should pursue. If you don’t like something and it irritates you, then that is your signal to do something about it. Take the time, don’t be so busy that you don’t know what you like. I think a lot of students today are so busy doing so many things that they don’t know what they truly like. They are doing things their parents like, or what their teachers want them to do, but we don’t spend enough time to figure out who you are, and finding what really thrills you.”

Marc Fages is the Quality Assurance Specialist of Supplier Quality Management at Amgen, a bio-pharmaceutical company recently voted to Forbes’ list of “100 best places to work for.”

Marc started out by going to UC Santa Barbara and almost didn’t finish college. He had A’s in his Marine Biology coursework but he felt that school was keeping him from his real passion: cooking. After college he planned on moving to Kauai with a life-long friend to open a fish taco restaurant. He cooked professionally for awhile, but with the arrival of his children his priorities soon shifted. Looking to do what was best for his family, he applied at Amgen and was hired.

He is now going into his eleventh year with Amgen, but his first year outside of the manufacturing department. In a ten year span, he was able to work his way up from making products hands on, to supervising production, to engineering facilities and is now a category manager within supplier quality management. To clarify, he manages a commodity of chemicals, small molecules, and raw materials that go into making drug products for use on humans. It is his job to ensure that the drugs’ specifications and expectations are met. Marc also deals with the relationship between Amgen and its suppliers.

When asked about how much of his college education he uses in his job, he responded:“I see college as preparing you how to work, how to investigate, and be resourceful of sorts. I majored in biology when I was in college, and its good to know about biology and math. From the perspective of college as a preparation tool, I use it all the time. Writing reports, research, and professionalism are all things that school prepared me for. One thing school did not prepare me for was business practices, which is something that I learned from mentors, meetings, and on the job training.”

One point in the interview that I thought was interesting and I have heard a few times on this trip was this quote:

“When people think they know it all, that is the biggest danger (to learning). It doesn’t matter what kind of degree you get, doesn’t matter where you work, there’s always something to learn…from anybody. Usually the people that teach you something is where you don’t expect it.” (On the same topic of learning from others) “Sometimes college students with a fresh perspective come in and make a simple question about procedures, and all of a sudden it’s like wow, I never looked at it from that perspective.”

When asked about how does a student achieve business confidence, the response was:

“If you don’t have much experience, it is important to know as much as you can about the company and the particular area of the company that you are applying for. By knowing about the specific area you will have an edge because at the end of every interview there is always the part where the interviewer asks if there are any questions they can answer. By asking what are you looking for, what do you expect, what do you want, you really have a better understanding of what you are getting into. (Related to confidence in an interview) Know who you are, know what you’re about, know where you want to go, and on the converse, know what you don’t know about yourself and what do you need to work on.”

A question relating to the first job:

“You have to be patient. If it’s your first job you want to go out and kick butt, but it takes awhile to learn. There’s always something to learn. You have to be respectful. You have to manage your time.”

“It’s one thing to learn something in a book, and then it’s another to go out and experience it. But it’s the book that sets you up.”

“A degree is very important. Lower level positions will be the only positions that will be available without a degree. Management also looks at a degree as what type of person and what type of background do they want their people to fit.”

What probably interested me the most was Marc’s philosophy of “the flight of stairs,” relating to changes in life. His philosophy was that people are cruising along in life, when all of the sudden you hit a challenge presents itself to them. They struggle with it until something clicks, progress is made and then they realize that they are on another next level. They’re happy with their accomplishment and continue cruising along until they hit some other thing that causes them to think and forces them to change. That’s when they know their onto the next level. According to Marc, this cycle perpetuates throughout your career. The biggest thing with this philosophy is that you can’t ever think that you have reached your final career destination, because you haven’t. The second you think that you’re “there” is when the ability to move on and grow is taken away.

“Young people don’t realize it until they experience some adversity, so when you hear someone saying those things over and over again, listen to them the best you can, and if it doesn’t make total sense, you’re just like the rest of us…including myself.”

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