The Laureates: Starting Young.

The pandemic prevented Junior Achievement (JA) of Alaska from celebrating the Alaska Business Hall of Fame in 2021. Instead of choosing a new cohort of laureates for 2022, JA of Alaska chose to postpone its event so that it could give the same honor, time, and attention to this fantastic and well-deserving group of inspirational business leaders.

In order to support JA of Alaska, we chose to run the laureates' profiles (easily accessible in our January 2021 digital edition, available on our website) in our January 2021 issue. One year later, we're highlighting the JA Alaska Business Hall of Fame Laureates in a different way. We hope you enjoy these brief accounts of some of their earliest introductions to business.

Rich Owens

Owner, Tastee Freez

Owens has been an entrepreneur his entire life and learned a spectacular lesson about business when he was quite young. As a boy, Owens lived in Montana near a pond that was home to hundreds of frogs. He decided he would make some money selling frogs to other kids in the neighborhood. He hiked back and forth between his yard-in which was a tub, awaiting its fate after a remodeling project, covered with a screen door--and the pond, collecting frogs (a couple hundred or so, Owens recalls) to sell and storing them in the tub.

It soon came to his attention that there was no demand for his frogs as the other kids in the neighborhood had the exact same access to free frogs in the pond. While his fledgling frog business didn't make it, he did learn a lesson that's stuck with him: "If you go into business, start with the market study. Don't get the frogs first," Owens laughs.

Chanda & Randy Mines

Owners, Bagoy's

For those who think flowers are easy--think again. Like any small business, it's full of challenges and obstacles, only with the added pressure of dealing with people in high emotional states as they plan weddings, funerals, births, or situations calling for a "thank you" or "I'm sorry." Fortunately, Chanda and Randy's experiences as children taught them how the good follows the hard.

Chanda's parents owned the shop from 1980 to 1991, and she worked there as a kid. "I think my dad fired me at least a dozen times for different reasons," she laughs. "As girls, we were kind of self-raising because [our parents] were so busy with so much work. My dad was working two jobs to be able to pay for it, and it was hard."

Randy says, "I grew up in the Midwest, and I grew up learning how to work hard every...