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Entrepreneur of the Year: What Alison Schuback Wants

With Michael working again, Donna hired Karen Weatherford, a senior-living and disability consultant, to recruit a full-time caregiver. While getting to know Alison, Weatherford became entranced by this surprising entrepreneur and her increasingly ambitious plans. She suspended her own business and signed on to help manufacture and market the Invisibib. In 2003, with $80,000 of her settlement as seed money, Schuback launched the company Independent Empowerment to sell the bib and other products customized for the disabled.

Michael schuback is behind the wheel of the family's van, with Alison beside him. He is skipping important meetings to be with his daughter today, and his cell phone won't let him forget it. Between calls, Michael plays tour guide -- we are rolling through the neighborhood where George Bush may settle post -- White House -- and quizzes Alison about sales techniques: What is the alternative-choice close? What is the Ben Franklin close? Alison responds with good humor. She has heard this drill her whole life.

"What is the one way to be 100 percent sure of failure?" Michael asks.

"Never make the call," says Alison. "You will have 100 percent failure if you don't try." Across the armrest, she and her father link fingers.

With motivational-speaker punch, Michael asserts repeatedly that his daughter will let nothing stop her. He has witnessed her tenacity, seen her do things like spend an hour a day on the treadmill at a setting of .1, in order to lose weight. She even joined Toastmasters. "For eight months, she got up in front of these people who couldn't even hear her and gave speeches," says Michael, managing to sound both awed and amused. "Everybody would be leaning forward. And I would sit there and think, What are we doing here?"

But inevitably, Schuback's disability made starting a business difficult. Her voice was still too weak for much telephone work. She wasn't steady enough with a pencil to write or draw. Five hours of each day were eaten up by therapies. Then there was the occasional brain surgery.

Still, Schuback knew one thing guarantees failure. So she set up a website to tell her story and talk about the product she was working on. With Weatherford, she contacted manufacturers; eventually, through a Schuback family connection, they found one in Philadelphia willing to make the bibs at an acceptable cost. (They were looking for a retail price of $12.) Then they experimented with different iterations. Schuback auditioned the prototypes herself. "I would put them on to wash my hair, put on my makeup, and eat," she says. One prototype was too thick, another too thin. "We tried one that fastened at the sides with Velcro, but that was hard in a wheelchair," says Schuback. "We tried one with three pockets to hold utensils, but that did not do a good job catching crumbs."

When they finally had a satisfactory product in hand, Schuback and Weatherford began striking deals with wholesalers to distribute items Schuback found useful, such as a beverage container that mounts to a wheelchair, a lamp switch enlarged for unsteady hands, and a device that holds playing cards. They also bought boxes of foam cylinders and affixed them to the handles of toothbrushes and utensils for easy gripping. A pocket on the back of Schuback's wheelchair still holds Independent Empowerment's dining travel kit, which includes an Invisibib, foam-handled utensils, and a nonskid placemat.

They promoted the site through Google ads. "But on the Web they were just going to sell one-sies, two-sies, and three-sies," says Donna, who helped with the bookkeeping. "Alison wanted to do more than that."

She wanted to do sales calls. She wanted to do trade fairs. "She was bashful at first," says Weatherford, now director of marketing and leasing at a retirement community in Irving, Texas. "But she was good. She could talk, and she could sell her product. Before a sales call, she would practice on a karaoke machine. Singing helped her vocals."

Over two years, Schuback and Weatherford made the rounds of more than 100 senior homes, rehab centers, and similar facilities. Sometimes they sold to individual residents, sometimes to the centers' procurement directors. But the orders were always small -- no more than 10 bibs at a time. Donna Schuback estimates Independent Empowerment did at most $20,000 in sales before it ran out of money. Much of that revenue came from a single order: 500 bibs purchased by The Vermont Country Store for catalog sales.