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says Clarke, who serves as CEO. In 2024, the company made the prestigious Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the country.
skills. Clarke selected a company with five founders who were still working in the business as her mentor. Clarke says these entrepreneurs have already faced and surmounted many of her current challenges.
Clarke has tapped many Small Business Administration (SBA) loans and other programs to support and finance her company’s growth, including its 8A program, which funnels opportunities to businesses run by disadvantaged individuals.
She has an agreement with her mentors to pursue specific goals, and she hopes the agreement will be “a guidepost through all the bumps along the way.” For anyone who aspires to start
and expand a business, “growing is bumpy — you will grow as a person and a business, and that is messy. It’s a lot of work!” she says.
“The SBA resources across the country have been so helpful,”
Clarke says. SBA directors in Wyoming helped her find the resources she needed, and representatives in San Diego provided consulting and support during the pandemic. “That was a scary time, and they reached out to help me through it,” she says. She also is participating in an SBA Mentor-Protege program to learn entrepreneurship and management
Clarke also continues to serve her country as a major in the Army Reserves. In the future, she wants to give back to the community by working with colleges and universities to help determine what skills are needed and to build educational programs and training to instill those skills. “Right now, I train my own employees,” she says. In the future, she hopes we can all “work together on that.”
HAVE A Laugh Ancient Wisdom or Legume Lunacy?
The Philosopher Who Feared Beans
Pythagoras (yes, the one responsible for making high school geometry a nightmare) had a dark secret. He wasn’t just a mathematical genius; he was also utterly terrified of beans. Specifically, fava beans. And not just in an I-don’t-like-their- texture kind of way. He believed they were portals to the underworld and, perhaps most offensively, they caused distracting gases. So, why was Pythagoras so scared of legumes? One of the more eyebrow-raising explanations is that he believed fava beans bore an uncanny
resemblance to reproductive organs. Another theory suggests Pythagoras believed beans were doors to the underworld. He wasn’t alone in this, as the ancient Greeks were suspicious of fava beans, perhaps because they could cause a rare genetic reaction called favism, which makes them potentially deadly. So, weirdly, Pythagoras may have been onto something. This shows that even history’s greatest minds had odd quirks; some were just stranger than others.
3 CraigHansonCPA.com
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