KC’s Makers Talk the Successes and Sacrifices Made for Entrepreneurship

Four members of Kansas City’s unique entrepreneurial landscape took the stage Thursday in the third annual “Meet the Makers” event.

And though they represented different focuses — socks, whiskey, coffee and ice cream — they shared an appreciation for the hard work it takes to be a business owner and for those who supported them along the way.

“Kansas City is a great place to be an entrepreneur,” said Laura Schmidt, chief positive person of sock company notes to self. “I thought about mentioning some of the organizations and people that helped me, but it would take a whole hour.”

The themes of community support and resilience in the face of adversity is something that each of the four speakers — Amber Schreiber, ’02, ’05 MBA, CEO of the Golden Scoop; Schmidt; Andy Rieger of J. Rieger and Co.; and Jackie Nguyen of Café Cà Phê — touched on in TED Talk style presentations hosted by Davin Gordon, ’13, program officer at the Hall Family Foundation. Schreiber said it was her sister who brought the idea of The Golden Scoop — an Overland Park, Kansas, based ice cream and coffee shop staffed by people with disabilities — to her. Taking that idea to fruition required a lot of hard work, research and luck. But when the Kansas City community learned about it, they showed up.

“The floodgates started opening, and people started to believe in what we were doing,” she said.

Rieger and Nguyen told similar stories. For both, their entrepreneurship was a second career — Rieger was working in finance in Dallas and Nguyen was a Broadway performer living in New York City. Rieger was pulled into what was his family’s distilling business, which blossomed into planning an attraction unlike anything else in the city amidst a pandemic. During that journey, he said, he was confronted with doubt from within himself or from others around him, and pushing through that was an important part of what he believes made J. Rieger and Co. and makes other entrepreneurs successful.

“What I will say to wannabe entrepreneurs is it’s tough,” he said. “It’s always going to be tough from the minute you start until the very last moment when you decide you want to hopefully be very successful and sell your business.”

Nguyen, too, said her decision to open a Vietnamese coffee shop in Kansas City was driven by the pandemic, having been laid off from a job as part of a Broadway touring company. But by channeling that same artistic drive into creating both a unique coffee shop and a space for Kansas City’s Asian-American community, she’s found a fulfilling — if sometimes challenging — path.

“One of the hardest lessons that I’ve learned is that you really never know what you’re doing,” she said. “That’s what entrepreneurship feels like. There’s no guide to life — you just are figuring it out, and then you hope that the next day comes and you feel OK. But it’s really fun because you’re in control of your path.”