Top 50 Mompreneurs, 2011

38 / 50

38

Angelica Menefee | Trampoline, Inc.

Company: Trampoline, Inc.

Location: Towson, Maryland

Children: Two daughters, 8 and 14, son, 12 ⢠Age: 41

Inspiration: After having her firstborn, Menefee balanced motherhood and a full-time teaching job for about a year. Then her daughter suffered from a series of flus and had to be on IV fluids for three days. “I was driving, rushing 40 minutes to the hospital,” Menefee says. “I decided on that day that I was never going to be away from my children while they were little.” When her kids got older, Menefee landed a job teaching preschool Spanish. Then she crunched the salary numbers. “I realized that the babysitter I had hired was making more than me,” she says. “That’s when I got the idea to write a curriculum that would make the ‘floating teacher’ obsolete. I wrote curriculums for foreign language, art history, etiquette, and team sports that any teacher could use in elementary schools.”

Perspiration: Menefee says the toughest challenge was teaching her children to respect a home-based business. “It was very hard to go from mother to professional during that time,” she admits. “It’s very easy for kids to take advantage of a mom with a schedule where everything can be dropped for them. We went through some battles trying to teach the kids that when [my office] door closes, don’t open it unless you’re bleeding.”

Success: In 2005, Menefee wrote a Spanish-language curriculum and sold it to her employer. Then she sold the curriculum to more preschools, recorded an audio CD to go with it and sold the whole package to a local preschool franchise. Today, Trampoline is in more than 500 schools across the US. Forbes estimated the company’s total revenues for 2009 as landing somewhere between $700,000 and $800,000.