YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Joe Nay of Cortland started selling and delivering firewood as a side hustle but wasn’t sure Ohio Wood Burner Ltd. was viable as a fulltime business.
Erica Dorio of Sharon, Pa., wanted to start a preschool. She knew early childhood curriculum but was less familiar with business basics.
Composing wedding photographs that capture a couple’s personal story comes easily to Paige Wasko, also of Sharon. But to start her photography business, she had to learn how to devise a contract and establish a limited liability corporation.
And Bill Barna of Warren, Ohio, invented the Bolo Stick door barricade device but didn’t know how to market it, where to have it manufactured or how to minimize costs.
Each relied on the expertise of the Small Business Development Center – Nay and Barna at Youngstown State University and Dorio and Wasko at Gannon University – to get their businesses off the ground. And they continue to call on center personnel to navigate challenges.
SBDCs are located across the country and in U.S. territories and funded in part by the U.S. Congress through partnership with the Small Business Administration. There is no charge to businesses for their services.
Business Ideas
Nay had worked in the corporate world but left to care for his ill father. Firewood started as a passion, but he didn’t consider himself a businessman. He wanted to launch Ohio Word Burner full time but wasn’t sure it would work.
About seven years ago, he found the SBDC at YSU and went for help. “They took me seriously,” Nay says.
When you have a business idea, you’re vulnerable, he explains. If someone would have told him in those early days that his was a stupid idea, he would have given up and returned to life as a corporate cog. But that didn’t happen.
The SBDC staff encouraged him. They urged him to start a company website and helped him do it. They taught him about search engine optimization too.
He calls Ohio Wood Burner Ltd. a value-added firewood delivery service.
He returns phone calls, shows up on time and uses invoices to bill customers. His firewood is clean and doesn’t leave a mess for his customers to clean up. That sets him apart from other businesses that deliver firewood.
His customers are restaurants and residents. While most services deliver large amounts, his residential deliveries amount to a half cord at most.
In 2014, Barna was a Howland Police officer with children in school. The number of school shootings across the country prompted him to develop the Bolo Stick. The device is attached to a door and makes it a barricade when a pin is slipped through it and into a hold drilled into the floor.
Barna learned about YSU’s SBDC from a friend who was a marketing professor at the university. He considers himself an idea man, not a numbers guy and he had a lot to learn about manufacturing, marketing, pricing and distributing a product.
A staffer at the SBDC asked questions about the product, Barna’s process and his plans. At that time, his manufacturing process was slow going.
“But they explained everything, from your cost of goods, your overhead, your packaging, distribution, how do you get it out to people, how do people find out about it, website presence, search engine optimization – I didn’t know any of these things…,” he says.
YSU SBDC Director Patricia Veisz and the late Bill Oliver walked Barna through every step. They helped him with a company website, introduced him to social media marketing and helped him find a company that would manufacture his device for less money.
His prototype involved an angled design which added production time. Through working with the SBDC, he smoothed the angles, speeding up production.
SBDC staff also introduced him to another one of their clients to make the screws that affix the Bolo Stick to the outside of a classroom door. He’s proud that his product is 100% American made and plans to keep it that way.
“Some people go to school for marketing,” Barna says. “Some people go to school just for manufacturing. I didn’t go to school for either one of those. And I’m not even a tool guy. I’m an idea guy, and then I’ve got to find people to make it work and I think that’s what the SBDC does best. They partner you up with people that make it work for you.”
Both Dorio and Wasko worked with Mike Blaurock, the Mercer County business consultant with the Gannon University SBDC for help.
Dorio had been mulling the idea of opening her own preschool for several years. As she entered her seventh year of teaching at an area school, she started considering what her next career move should be. That was in 2023.
“And at that point, my husband and I had really started kicking around the idea of doing this for real, and trying it out,” Dorio recalls.
But she needed help.
“The teaching and education part – that felt natural,” Dorio says. “That felt comfortable for me. That felt good. I wasn’t worried about curriculum. I wasn’t worried about what materials I needed. I had a pretty good idea of what that would look like. The business side was all new. That’s what I needed a lot of help with.”
Learning the Basics
Creating a business plan, securing funding, getting a space and working on a lease was new territory for her. In November 2023, she reached out to Blaurock and discovered what she needed to do. She attended an SBDC First Steps seminar where she learned the elements of a business plan and that businesses that write a plan and continuously refer to it year after year are more likely to succeed.
“I just kept that in the back of my mind: here’s where we’re starting, here’s where we want to grow and all those things,” Dorio explains.
She worked with Blaurock to refine the plan, establish a limited liability company and devise financial projections. Last September, In Bloom Preschool opened in the Hope Center for Arts and Technology in Sharon. Fifteen students are enrolled.
Wasko bought her first camera at 16 and started taking photographs of her friends and family while in high school.
“I would pick up a bunch of my friends. We would go watch the sunset somewhere. I would take my camera with me,” she recalls. “I would take pictures of everyone and just take a picture of the sunset, and we would enjoy our experience so much.”
She enjoyed the work and booked freelance jobs with photographers, shooting weddings and other events. After a couple of years, she wanted to strike out on her own.
“And so that’s when I found the SBDC, and it was just really helpful for me,” Wasko says.
Blaurock helped her establish her LLC and develop her business plan. Law students from Penn State helped her draft contract language.
“It was just really helpful for me to have that resource,” Wasko says. “And I definitely think it helped me legitimize my business, which is really important…”
Her LLC started in February 2024 and her website is paigewasko.com. She shoots weddings mainly in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys but has two destination weddings booked this year – in Romania and Yosemite National Park. She says her business has grown and hopes to move into her own studio space.
“From a business standpoint, once you legitimize the business, it’s like the law of attraction, right?” she says. “Once you legitimize something, a lot of clients come to you. And between that and my work, I think that I’m settling into a really, really good place with clients that I truly, truly love.”
Success
Barna says the Bolo Stick is used by hundreds of schools in 47 states and six countries. Annual sales range between $400,000 and $500,000.
Since his start, he’s added a residential door device as well as a device to prevent residential sliding glass doors from being lifted off their tracks. He still calls on the SBDC at times – including when he gets offers to buy his business from large companies and wants to know if they are good.
“They’ve got formulas for stuff like that,” Barna says.
Nay, who moved his business three years ago from his home to a location on state Route 5 in Cortland, estimates his annual sales at about $100,000.
He’s amassed a loyal following on his YouTube channel, which discusses all things firewood. His videos log thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of views. After a video featured an expensive log splitter made by a Finnish manufacturer, sales of that machine skyrocketed.
He still contacts the SBDC when he has a question. “I consider the SBDC a vital part of my business,” he says. “I would not be here if not for them.”
Pictured at top: Joe Nay, owner of Ohio Wood Burner Ltd., shows a log splitter he uses at his Cortland business. He started the business after consulting with the SBDC at Youngstown State University.