West Coast Tacos

Name: Arnold Park

I am a former U.S.  Army Infantryman, a private Christian high school teacher and former financial advisor. In December of 2009, I was severely injured with a slipped disc in my lower back. It took me 3 months to come back to work and when I had returned, they wanted money for my unused cubicle space. I worked at [a large financial services company] in Irvine, Calif., for 3 years commuting everyday from Los Angeles, and this is how they treated me.

So I quit my job that day and put my car up for sale online. I was convinced that if I were ever to work hard again, it would have to be for myself…

Pampered Passions Fine Lingerie & Post Mastectomy Services

Name: Alicia Vargo

After a negative bra shopping experience at the leading lingerie retail chain, I left feeling worse about my body, and decided to do something about it. In 2001, along with my husband, John, started an online fine lingerie store called Pampered Passions Fine Lingerie. The mission of our business: “Nurture the Female Spirit!”

In 2003, the online store afforded us the luxury of opening the largest retail fine lingerie store in the Colorado market. After two months in business an elderly woman walked in looking for answers as she had been just diagnosed with breast cancer. We did not have the answers for her, and this would be the last person to grace our store that we did not have answers for. We had a full-fledged post-mastectomy division within a month. This was very hard on our business, as we billed out insurance for the patients and insurance and Medicare made it very challenging to float the dollars needed to wait for reimbursement. All we wished to do was take care of our patients. …

Little Genius Club Inc.

Name: Doris Vela

I was born in Brownsville, Texas, and raised in a very humble neighborhood in Mexico. In 1997, I decided to immigrate to the U.S., and started a pre-business degree in the University of Texas at Brownsville & Texas Southmost College with the aid of a grant. This stage in my life was very difficult since my family’s financial situation was very critical and I did not speak English. During this time, I was determined to learn English and finish my degree.

In 1999, I transferred to the University of Houston with no money, no family, no support, but with a dream. During this year, I was selected to be an intern at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Houston. In August 2000, I became part of the J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. National Staffing Network in Downtown Houston. In December 2001, I earned a Bachelor Degree in Business Administration with a major in Management and a minor in Spanish. The weekend after my graduation, I got married and in 2003 my first daughter was born. She has been my inspiration. I decided to dedicate my life to educate her and her sister, who was born with a chronic kidney disease in 2006.

In 2003, I moved from the corporate world to the education field. After working as a pre-kindergarten bilingual teacher for the Houston and Pearland Independent School District, in December 2007, I decided to open an Early Childhood Center in the Pearland Old Townsite.  …

Closing In On the Winners

Entrepreneurs, get ready to celebrate. In less than a month, we’ll announce the winners of WSJ.com’s Small Business, Big Innovation competition.

WSJ.com asked set out to find America’s most innovative small businesses in the wake of the recession. Entrepreneurs were asked to describe how they coped with the challenges they faced as a result of the economic downturn. The competition generated more than 100 entries.

Readers then placed votes for the small business with the most creative, imaginative or cutting-edge solution for overcoming a major recession-related headache. …

The Speaking Book

Name: Brian Julius

The Speaking Book was the result of the World Bank Development Marketplace Winner’s award to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group charity (SADAG) for a Teen Suicide Prevention program.

Books of Hope was established to work with SADAG to meet their requirements to design, test and produce an interactive multilingual educational tool. The resulting Speaking Book consists of 16 pages of colorful illustrations supported by straightforward and easy to understand text. For each page there is a corresponding push button that triggers a sound track of the text, so no matter the level of reading comprehension, the information will be seen, read, heard and understood with powerful results, making it a most cost effective educational tool.

Our second book “Living with HIV and AIDS doesn’t mean living with Depression” firmly established The Speaking Book as a viable cost effective “edutainment tool” with research showing an average of 27 users per book being recorded when used by Home Based Care Workers. …

James Feldman Associates Inc.

Name: James Feldman

For over 35 years I had been a successful entrepreneur, consultant, marketing expert and keynote speaker. In 2009, the economy’s collapse caused me to lose almost everything. I had to close one of my offices, layoff 98% of my employees and lost 99% of my eponymous company’s revenue. I had a contract with my largest client-$75,000,000- that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on due to their default of over $1Billion to banks, as the speaking business collapsed because after the White House, Congress and Barack Obama castigated AIG for spending $440,000 at the St. Regis resort in Monarch Beach, annual conferences/meetings were radically scaled back. I had to start from scratch in an economy that everyone compared to the Great Depression.

After many sleepless nights, I realized it was time to take a dose of my own medicine. As a professional speaker, I had been speaking about change management for over 30 years. So I decided to use the recession as an opportunity to articulate a new way of approaching life – financially, personally and career-wise. I wrote a book about it, and I reinvented myself as a change management adviser….

Dennis Corporation

Name: Abby Rouen

Sitting in a small office of a rented building space, Dan Dennis stared out of the window to the parking lot below. Trucks were headed for jobsites and he noted the dwindling number; work was drying up, both friends and competitors were closing shop and the industry maintained its tailspin.

For the architecture and engineering industry, the year 2010 offered little respite from the crushing 2009 recession and the global economic crisis. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the inordinately high unemployment rate left 1.46 million looking for work throughout all levels of the construction industry and specialty.

Industry morale was low and our firm was not immune to the negative contagion. As an extremely young and small company, it was unlikely we could survive such a harsh economic climate. Dan Dennis, president of Dennis Corporation, surveyed his options and calculated the risk of forging through the surmounting obstacle. Like an overgrown forest floor, he could see the light through the trees but knew the firm would have to beat its own path. …

Model Metrics Inc.

Name: Adam Caplan

During the recession, our biggest challenge was customers cautiously – and slowly – choosing  IT investments. In general, all vendors were experiencing deals shelved due to limited spending, especially for more forward-looking (i.e. cloud) investments. In response, we decided to take a risk and invest resources into an emerging and relatively untapped market: the mobile cloud.

We’ve always been focused on helping enterprises capitalize on the benefits of cloud computing to run their businesses, but we took a gamble that mobilizing the cloud would be the next frontier. We had to act fast to stay on top, developing a potential new revenue stream.

During the recession, mobile projects accounted for only 5% of our revenue. Unlike most, we hired and tapped into our expanding team’s skills to develop the 2GO Mobile Cloud Platform, the first mobile cloud platform developed for the enterprise. The 2GO Mobile Cloud Platform proved disruptive beyond expectations – in cost efficiency, technology innovation, ease of use, customer demand and new business. It met an immediate and growing need for enterprise users to take critical business functionality anywhere and on any mobile device. …

Himalayan Restaurant

Name: Jennifer Lezan

Many people come to America with the hopes of pursuing the “American Dream.” Coming from Nepal and seeing the opportunities that America presents to people with high goals, all of us at The Himalayan Restaurant would never have guessed that we would be where we are today. Vivek and I (Kiran) started in the tech industry. Little did we know that our love for our food and our innate desire to share our culture would lead us into the world of restaurants. For the last eight years, The Himalayan Restaurant has been bringing the Indian Sub Continent and its wonderful flavors to the local Chicago and suburban people.

In order to make it through the bleakest of times, we pushed ourselves and utilized creative thinking to ensure the success of our business. We threw out the traditional restaurant marketing ideals of sending out coupons in the mail and advertising in print mediums with little to no guarantee on return and looked at new options online and had to learn a lot along the way.

We had to learn how to interact with our customers on a viral level and learn what online opportunities worked best for us. We tweaked and adjusted along the way. We have investigated and embarked on many paths in terms of helping our business grow. The most fruitful has been utilizing technology, social media and pr/marketing to help us connect with our consumer and educate them on our brand. …

Chinese Language School of Connecticut

Name: Susan Serven

We adopted our two daughters from China in 1996 and 2000. Our older daughter, Emily, started asking, “How do I say ‘dog’ in Chinese? How do I say ‘flower’?” I realized how important it was to allow her to understand her native language and culture, so I worked with a native Chinese-speaking friend to start Chopstix, in 1999. Chopstix was a volunteer-run preschool Chinese program that donated all net proceeds to U.S. nonprofits working with children in Chinese orphanages.

When Emily was 5, I enrolled her in a traditional, “cultural” Chinese school, where we were the only non-Chinese speakers. She still loved learning Chinese, but this experience gave me the opportunity to work with some of the professional, highly dedicated colleagues I met there to form the nonprofit, dual-accredited Chinese Language School of Connecticut, in 2002.

CLSC teaches Mandarin Chinese using U.S.-based immersion techniques and age-appropriate, interactive activities to students ages 18 months to adult via various programs. …

LoveBook LLC

Name: Chris Sonjeow

The story starts with two hopeless romantic guys sitting around a lunch table trying to figure out Christmas gifts for our significant others. One guy pulls out a little notebook with stick-figure drawings and a list of reasons why he loved his wife. Being a Web developer, I said, “This needs to be available for everyone.”

We quickly rounded up two other friends in the Web-development business and LoveBook was born.

We began working on the first concepts of LoveBookOnline.com. We spent the first 2 years developing. After our 9-5 jobs were over we would meet at any local bar or restaurant that had WiFi access. We would open our laptops and get to work. …

Sanctuary T

Name: Dawn Cameron

I left a successful career in banking to pursue my dream of opening a tea shop. I found a space, signed a lease, qualified for an SBA loan, and invested a big chunk of my savings in a security deposit for that lease. Within a month of signing it, the tenants that lived above the space sued me to prevent me from providing food and beverages in the space. I had never been sued before and was terrified. I surrendered without a fight and lost everything.

That was enough for me, but my incredibly supportive husband and a very supportive small-business banker at Chase encouraged me to try again. Chase extended me the same terms for a second location and I dove in, determined to make this a success.

After nearly a year of renovating the new space, we opened in August 2007 just as the economy was beginning to turn down. I used up my line of credit from Chase — in place to fund our expected losses for a year — in less than three months. It was my husband’s turn to pour his savings into the teas hop, which he did without flinching. …

Mobi

Name: Scott Kraege

Together, in 2001, our five partners established Bluefish Wireless Management Inc. Our concept was to develop a strategic partnership with Sprint to provide value-added services that Sprint struggled to bring to market on its own to enterprise customers. At the start, that meant white-glove help-desk services, bill auditing and rate-plan optimization. But, over a short time frame, the complexity of wireless technology exploded – email, third-party applications, security needs, new devices and operating platforms, specialized electronic billing, and systems integration, among other services. The demand for our solutions grew in parallel with the growth of new technologies. We adapted quickly to be able to help enterprises manage these new technologies seamlessly.

Over time, we became subject-matter experts on all things wireless and clients began to look to us for guidance on best practices. Bluefish ultimately evolved into a technology company, using Web portals, billing-management tools and direct-systems integration to deliver a wide range of services. In 2008, we became Sprint’s largest Business Solutions Partner, managing key clients including IBM, Intel, the USDA, HP, Kellogg, Ford Motor Company, Oracle, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice and several state governments. As an organization, Bluefish grew quickly and was recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America in both 2008 and 2009.  …

• Enter the competition by Monday, Sept. 5
• See the competition rules.