THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506030278
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE KNEPLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
Joyce Lundy sells more than candies and potato chips from her home-based snack shop.
She's been selling herself on success.
``The more you learn, the more you want to do,'' said Lundy, who opened Joyce's Snack Shop in her Diggs Town apartment in February 1994 after getting the appropriate zoning permit and business license.
The wares in her apartment include 50 types of candies and assorted potato chips, cookies, sodas and pickles. They're spread across a table and countertop in her small dining room and kitchen, on the first floor of her two-story apartment.
Lundy, 45, was a member of the first graduating class of ``Women Working Together,'' an entrepreneurial training program.
Now, she helps inspire other budding small-business owners who enroll in the course. Along with several of her 1993 classmates, Lundy helps instructor Pat MacMaster team-teach new students.
``I get a kick out of it,'' Lundy said. ``It makes you feel good, helping someone, and knowing how far you've come. . . You see yourself from where you started all over again.''
Lundy came to the program by accident. She thought it would be a skills-training program for working with computers.
``It turned out it was for small business,'' she recalled. ``I thought that would be a long stretch for me right now. But then I figured out that maybe the kids here needed something like a candy store.''
Although her four children are grown, Lundy remembers what it was like to worry about them.
``As a parent, I would feel safer if my little child didn't have to cross a street or go far away,'' she said. ``If I opened a store, that way people here would know where the candy came from, who's selling it to the child.''
If she's not waiting on another customer, Lundy teaches her small shoppers to count change when they turn over a fistful of coins.
The customers, mostly children, buzz around Lundy's front porch, calling for her or trying to get her attention with shy knocks on the screen door. She beckons them into her kitchen where they peruse the sweets and other goodies.
Operating a small business has proven to be more challenging than Lundy anticipated. She has learned that running a business involves much more than making change. ``I thought, `How hard can it be to sell candy?' '' she recalled. ``You have to find out where to get this stuff. You have to find out where the suppliers are. You have to get it or get it delivered.''
There were mistakes in filing tax statements and learning to judge what merchandise sells and which sit on the shelf. There was also nervous anticipation.
Last summer, Lundy began to panic, even refusing to leave her home-business, out of fear she'd miss a customer. ``I was so paranoid, I didn't go to my grandson's birthday party,'' she said. ``I kept going over in my mind things that I hadn't done.''
But Lundy learned that it was necessary to set certain shop hours. ``You take a break,'' she said, ``or you break down.''
She began to understand why many small businesses fail in their first two years.
Lundy credits the patience, availability and prodding of MacMaster, the instructor. But another key aspect of the program was brainstorming with classmates, especially neighbors Angela Williams and Mary Thomas, and Thomas' daughter-in-law, Paula Taylor. And, after the 12-week class ended, the women stayed together as a monthly support group.
Although the spring session of Women Working Together included two men for the first time, MacMaster believes it's better to separate at least some classes.
Only women are enrolled in MacMaster's current class, at a Virginia Beach YMCA.
``Poverty affects men and women differently,'' MacMaster said. Women, she said, play more roles in a family than men and can work off anger through the activities. Yet women also must contend with more physical abuse.
``If they can't play the provider role, it becomes very frustrating,'' MacMaster said. ``They feel they are doing all the right things, but their family is still in dire straits. They contemplate leaving so their family will be better off. That's a terrible choice to have to make. It can be very degrading.''
MacMaster has an idea for at least one remedy: ``You've got to allow people to dream again.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/Staff
Joyce Lundy, left, a 1993 graduate of Women Working Together, talks
with Mary Thomas during a class in Norfolk.
by CNB