Getting a small business off the ground and keeping it afloat can be a daunting task in the best of times. According to the Small Business Administration, less than 70 percent of new employers survive the first two years and only a little more than half — 51 percent — are still i......

The first five years are the most difficult and perilous for any small business, said Jim Eshleman, whose firm Strategic Endeavors specializes in advising business owners on long-range exit planning and helping them sell or transfer their successful businesses when that time comes. Here's Es......

For a guy who started out without any intention of going into business, Mark Amway has certainly picked up the pace with his Inside Track stores. In addition to his longtime shops selling running shoes and accessories here and in Harrisburg, Amway just opened a third store this month at Silver ......

A glass trade magazine has reported that there is a deal in place to sell Harrisburg-based Cindy Rowe Auto Glass Inc.Glassbytes, an auto glass and insurance trade publication, reported that the 28-year-old company will be sold to Belron US of Columbus, Ohio.The report said Belron ha......

Some of Don Denlinger's business brainstorms are reminiscent of the 1989 movie "Field of Dreams," in which an Iowa farmer hears a voice telling him, "If you build it, he will come." For farmer Ray Kinsella, played by actor Kevin Costner, the dream was to build a baseball......

There's a new face on Lancaster's economic development front — that of Ramon Escudero, who has taken the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce & Industry's newly created position of entrepreneurship ombudsman. Escudero will oversee Lancaster's Keystone Innovation Zone for the ......

Renee Valentine launched Milagro House 10 years ago with a dream and a leap of faith. And she's taking another one. Valentine will leave Milagro House at the end of the year. The founder and executive director of the education-based nonprofit for homeless women and their children ......

(Los Angeles Times)Earvin "Magic" Johnson announced his arrival as a businessman 13 years ago, when he took part in an unusual meeting with gang leaders from the Bloods and the Crips. At the time, Johnson was building a movie theater in Baldwin Hills. Would the gang members, Johnson a......

Jasmine Ramirez soon begins a new chapter in her professional career. The 23-year-old Lititz resident will open her own hair salon, Jas It Up Hair Studio, at 24 N. Mary St. in early July. Ramirez is ambitious, independent, and above all, tech-savvy. She couldn't imagine working wi......

You know the guy who shows up at his high school reunion, trying to impress everyone with tall tales? That's not Ernie Dianastasis. Because Dianastasis wouldn't need to resort to embellishment to describe what he's accomplished in the three-plus decades since he graduated. The ......

"I'm a Puerto Rican straight male in a predominantly white woman's field. I've been in the [hair-styling] business 20 years, but I didn't do it all by myself," said Leo Rodriguez, owner of DFB Studios on East Orange Street. He credits his success to small business loan......

Mike Breidenstein's company, Emulous Communications, closed out 2007 with about 150 customers. By the end of the day Jan. 2, that number had grown to more than 1,000. Breidenstein started Emulous a couple of years ago with a single customer, working out of his garage in his spare time ......

Persistence is about to pay off for Matt Keasey. After five years of planning, the Conestoga resident will open a micro-brewery in about two weeks. Spring House Brewing Co., in a renovated tobacco barn on his 2519 Main St. property, will begin by making his proprietary Seven Gates Pale Ale......

When City Image, a hip-hop apparel store, opened along Manor Street in March 2004, it had only 500 square feet of floor space and didn't appear to be destined for success. The owner, Zachary Sheaffer, was determined to make his business work with the few thousand dollars he had saved. ......

ASSETS Lancaster will unveil a new entrepreneur-training program and present three awards at its annual dinner at 6:30 tonight in Wheatland Place. The program, named ASSETS 2.0, will teach entrepreneurs how to use computer technology for accounting, presentations, e-commerce and other business ......

She began growing organic vegetables — 250 types in all — and started other programs to help local families in need.

Rogowski told her story Tuesday as the keynote speaker at the conference on Celebrating Agriculture’s Women Entrepreneurs. The conference was part of Women in Agric...

Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and moderator and managing editor for “Washington Week,” will be the keynote speaker at a King breakfast at 7 a.m. Monday, a federal holiday. Crispus Attucks Community Center will host the annual event at Thaddeus Stevens College......

Four community leaders answered that question Monday during a forum sponsored by the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce & Industry. Three of the four indicated they would spend the bulk of their allotment improving the quality of life in the county’s urban centers. Michael Lockhart, CEO of Armstron......

Vickie and David Shuman hope not. They opened Your Meal Ticket, a meal-assembly business, Nov. 14, at 1509B Lititz Pike, in the Lancaster Shopping Center. The business is the third of its type to open in the past two years in Lancaster County. Dish it Up Dinners debuted in Elizabethtown in May......

Dan Betancourt, president and chief executive of Community First, will be in Reading this afternoon to meet with bank officials, business leaders and elected officials for the presentation.

Community First will use the capital to provide affordable loans to small businesses, affordable-housin...

The opportunity for real-life learning. Students in Millersville University professor Mark Sheridan-Rabideau’s Music Business class have created an organization called “Artists Now.” Their goal is to bring music and the arts to the community. “The students have taken on real projects, encou......

Armstrong in December said it would donate a portion of its 65-acre Liberty Street flooring-plant property to EDC and F&M when it ceases production at the plant. Production is expected to cease in May. Armstrong will maintain about 20 acres of the site, where it will build a modern flooring plant....

The ultimate goal is to plug the leak in the county’s pool of college-educated workers.


Meeting for the past two years, the members of the task force last week announced they’ve formally organized into a team that will work with the county’s economic development experts to att...

Recent Census data confirms that new minority-owned businesses are growing at more than six times the national rate. In fact, the Secretary of Commerce reported that minorities own 15 percent of the nation’s businesses, employ 4.5 million people and generate $591.3 billion in gross receipts.

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So last year, she set up a video camera, read “Whose Garden Is It?” and put the DVD in the mail. In talking to her friends, she found that most of them had grandchildren living outside the area, so she decided to open a business to help people read children’s books, their life stories or even the......

For one day each year, Mr. Turley’s science room undergoes a metamorphosis from beakers and burners to bartering and bedlam.

To add some fun and interest to the Latin American portion of social studies, LAMS’ sixth grade students have an annual Latin American Market. The purpose of this ventu...

Not only is the Manheim Township Board of Commissioners in an uproar over a highly contentious proposal to build a $20 million Overlook Park community and fitness center, but the Manheim Township school board has generated a lot of interest.

Reportedly, more than a dozen people are in...

Mrs. Cerullo’s class participated in a year-long economics project in which they developed two competing cookie companies. The companies sold several varieties of cookies (baked by the district’s food services department) twice a week to the other students and staff at Schoeneck. They were responsib...

"I love the city," Kelly Withum said a week after the DID board of directors chose her to head the agency. "It's blossoming. It's in the beginning of revitalization."

The 50-year-old business owner begins her DID career at a time when many people speak in superlatives about Lancas......

Organizers of the Lancaster County Library’s award-winning service, Biz Info to Grow (BIG), are moving the program out of the library’s 125 N. Duke St. location and into a storefront up the street. The program, which is also sometimes referred to as “BIG/BIZ Downtown,” has offered help for nearly......

Del’s favorite decade, however, proved to be the 1950s. Del and his wife Belva attended their “Lost in the ’50s” 50th anniversary celebration Aug. 29 in a light-blue 1952 Pontiac Catalina hardtop identical to the one he had when they were dating.


Their favorite band from their dating ......

“Lancaster earned its ranking due to steady employment, a low crime rate and little risk of natural disasters,’’ according the Los Angeles-based insurer, the nation’s third-largest personal property and casualty insurance group. Lancaster County leaders say they are not surprised by the findings.......

Timothy W. Peters, chairman and chief executive officer of Warfel Construction Co.,this morning outlined the LancasterProspers Plan initiated by the EDC last year to "insure Lancaster's current and future prosperity.'' "Lancaster, like many communities in the Northeast, has not aggressively ......

The Rev. Ed Bailey's church runs an Underground Railroad history program, so you might say he knows something about the period.

But it took a visit to an art shop in South Carolina two years ago for Bailey to discover a little-known detail about the slave era: African Americans' pictures on S...

It's a simple notion, the brainstorm of a citizens group formed this spring by city businesswoman Patti Connell, and it's catching on in a big way. In the past few months, more than 10,000 bumper stickers and buttons have been distributed throughout the city -- and more are on......

Rivertownes, an organization representing Columbia, Wrightsville and Marietta, sponsored the reenactment of events 140 years ago. They called it "Flames Across the Susquehanna.''

The evening's major activity involved igniting piles of firewood on each of the piers remaining from the cover...

Alexander Graham Bell might be shocked, but many Lancaster County residents probably wouldn't be surprised that a higher percentage of county homes have no household telephone service compared to the state as a whole.

The county has a large Plain population so that finding is what one would e...

Jacqueline Glassmyer said people "just rave'' over her trademark caramel corn and her fresh-made salads.

Oscar York believes his "catch of the day'' will be what everyone's having for dinner.

Optimism and ebullience, mixed with a pinch of nerves and self-doubt, were brewing at Cent...