We had the opportunity to interview Olympic gold medalist Hannah Teter about her entrepreneurial venture. Teter is leveraging her celebrity status to feed orphaned Africans in Kirindon, Kenya.

For the past three years, Hannah’s Gold has sold bottles of amber Vermont maple syrup in order to help with numerous projects including water purification, farming tools, seeds, fertilizers, sustainable farming initiatives, and much more.

Teter’s business works symbiotically with her Olympic snowboarding career: Snowboarding drives Hannah’s Gold which, in turn, drives Hannah to snowboard her best for the success of her charity.

Q: How did your business come about?

It came about after the 2006 winter Olympics in Italy. I wanted to start a nonprofit that would raise money and awareness for children in struggling areas.

Q: What was a challenge you overcame getting started and how did you overcome it?

I overcame the challenge of wanting to do something that wasn’t self focused and outside my realm of experience. I over came this by researching statistics on the areas in need, other charities in the space, and watching videos on living situations in the 3rd world.

Q: How do you “juggle” sports commitments and running a business?

I put a lot of time and effort into both! They are very important in each of their own ways. Both supplement my passion for the other. It gives me even more of a passion to do well in my snowboarding career to benefit my charity, so I try to give it all I got on both sides.

Q: How do you manage to run your business from the road?

My mom plays the biggest part on helping to manage and keep things on track. She is really the most “on it” person I know and helps keep it all together.

Q: What tools, sites, applications, and devices do you use to help you do your work especially when on the road?

Well, I try to advertise through MySpace, Facebook, and go211.com to get people stoked on the charity.

Q: What do you think being involved in sports - particularly at the Olympic level - brings to your involvement with business? i.e. how does being an Olympian affect your work as an entrepreneur or vice versa?

It provides an elevated platform that partially guarantees the fact that, if you got something to say, people are going to listen a little more than the average person. So when I realized this, I wanted to start to know everything and anything and share with people what I’ve discovered. I’ve started to talk a lot about the importance of eating organic, non-genetically modified food, and being healthy because I know a lot of sickness and disease stem from body and mind health. I want to be an information source to young people, and because I am an Olympian, people might listen to me a little more than if I was not. I’m able to raise more money for my charity because I have that platform. Without it, I don’t think it would be as successful.

How have you sweetened your success with charitable work or donations? Which is your favorite celebrity charity?

Photos Courtesy: NBC-USOC

I haven’t participated in a lot of conference calls, mostly because I do a lot of my communications via email. Also, more recently, I use Skype to make free long distance calls and for conferencing people from California to Australia. But lately, I have been checking out a number of free conference call applications  on the Web (that do require calling a TOLL number) and thinking about how they might help me in my business. Those apps include FreeConference.com, Rondee, and I’m also going to check out Palbee and DimDim.

In the last few weeks, I’ve actually been putting one of the applications - Calliflower - to use. I’ve been corresponding with several other women and doing some brainstorming and mutual pep talks as each of us try to take our careers and businesses to the next level. We have a lot of ideas for ways we can help one another as well as work together.

Email was just not sufficient for our “talks.” So we’ve set up a regular weekly conference call with the four of us. And if one of us can’t make it? Calliflower lets us record the call and save it as an MP3 file that we can access later if we missed the call.

How else can you take advantage of the free conferencing apps out there? Let me count the ways…

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I’m in the middle of a company crisis and have decided to do a series of blog posts about how I’m solving the situation. Don’t worry - my company is actually thriving. The crisis is…more complicated, and I’m probably not yet ready to talk about it at this time.

One small component of the crisis has led me to re-evaluate my business relationship with my current bank and to suck it up and leave this bank for another one. This move has been long overdue and has only been held back by my own personal (and unfounded) fears.

The bank I’m currently with has been a nightmare from Day 1. The problems started with the new bank employee who set up our company account in January 2005 and made a slew of errors including mispelling our names multiple times which continued to haunt us over time. I ended up with a 5-page, single spaced typed document outlining every egregious error that the bank made (almost every one of them that they admitted to doing) that cost us time, money and sanity. To this day, I still have not had my call returned when I left a customer service voicemail - per their instructions - asking for a supervisor to call me back to address my complaints. That was 2 plus years ago.

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A client of mine teased me the other day when she saw me pull out my calendar book to write down an entry.

“I thought you were so tech, and here you are with a paper calendar,” she said by way of explanation.

“But I have a 30Boxes calendar as well!” I retorted. “And it sends me text message reminders to my cellphone!”

I don’t know why I felt that I needed to prove my tech savvy by rattling off how wired I really am and that the paper calendar is just my first line of defense against my progressively bad memory.

I just like the tangible feeling of a paper calendar. I like the feeling of pen on paper. I like seeing what I write on a page. Our words are so digitized these days with reading and writing emails, reading our news on Web sites, connecting with others through online social networks - that for me, writing things down on paper really grounds me.

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Coming up with a name for your new company can be tough. Do you use your own name such as Aliza Sherman and Associates, adding the “Associates” part even though you are only a company of one just so you sound bigger? Do you come up with a strange new word for your name like “Azila Multimedia.” which is Aliza spelled backwords, by the way. And with the Web being so essential to your overall brand, finding a domain name that isn’t yet taken is a challenge.

I thought I’d share how I came up with my business names over the years and also include anecdotes from other women about how they named their businesses. Also check out this previous post that includes some tips on naming your business.
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This question was recently posed to WorkItMom:

“If I am going to start a business, does it mean that I will have to work 10 hours a day from the start?”

The quick and easy answer to this question is: It depends what kind of business you want to start.

But even hearing the question makes me wonder what people think business ownership is all about.
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I thought it would be interesting to hear from women who started their companies that sell products. How did they find the product or develop the product idea? How did they bring it to market?

Lisa Jarrett is president of BabyPlus Company in Indianapolis. She became the sole manufacturer for the BabyPlus Prenatal Education System that she licensed from the doctor who developed it. The system is a patented prenatal curriculum designed to strengthen a child’s long-term learning capabilities.

Lisa has 7 children: step-children Jennifer, Jay and Casey and bio children Madeline: 15; Olivia: 13; Michael: 11, Lilligrace: 3.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your product?

A: My husband is a physician, a reproductive endocrinologist, and was reading a medical journal in 1990. He came across an article about Dr. Brent Logan’s work that caught his attention. The associated clinical trial compared developing babies introduced to three different types of auditory sounds and the cognitive influence of each: a curriculum utilizing simple rhythmic sounds similar to a mother’s heartbeat, a classical musical piece, and a control group with simple white noise.
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