Retiring Entrepreneurs Give College the Business

LAGUNA NIGUEL —  Anna Lea Rickey stood in her driveway Saturday and waved goodby to her business.

“Have fun, good luck,” she called out to the Cal State Fullerton students who were loading 1,896 boxes of her inventory into a moving truck.

“Feel free to call any time,” added her husband, Kenneth L. Rickey.

For five years, Anna Lea Rickey has been producing and selling novelty books from her home. But last year, she learned that her husband had an incurable form of cancer.

With a vision problem of her own, the 58-year-old mother of six decided it was time to bow out. Now she is donating the entire business, worth more than $150,000, to the Small Business Institute at Cal State Fullerton, and letting student entrepreneurs pick up where she left off.

“We’ll give the next generation a whack at it,” Kenneth Rickey said. “I’m sure they’ll have some pretty sharp people working on it. I have much more faith in them than a lot of people do.”

Roughly 60 students will use Sole Prints Inc. as a hands-on teaching tool, said Michael D. Ames, director of the Small Business Institute. The first decision the students will face, he liquidate the business, sell it, or figure out how to run it profitably themselves.

But the officers of the Assn. of Collegiate Entrepreneurs, the club that will work on the business, already have decided that they want to keep it alive, said the group’s president, Amy Greenawalt, 21.

“It’s good experience for entrepreneurs,” she said. “It gives them hands-on experience on how to run a business, and besides, it would be fun.”

Said Ames: “I know they’re serious because they’ve already spent a lot of time in the law library researching copyrights.”

The idea for Sole Prints Inc. was hatched in 1976. For years, Anna Lea Rickey had been making albums for her children that included their childhood art, school papers, photographs--as well as their horoscopes, birthstones and the flower of their birth month. The albums were a hit, and eventually she decided to produce such personalized albums for sale.

She hired El Paso artist Barbara Rochford to do the illustrations, and the first pages rolled off the press in 1984. The albums, which she sold by mail order for $25, include information including the recipient’s name, birth date, horoscope and numerology.

Using a total of 84 printed pages, she would compile the albums by hand, emboss the recipient’s name in gold on the cover, add personal information and even type in the name in Egyptian hieroglyphics with an IBM typewriter font specially made for the job.

A three-time winner of the U.S. Air Force’s Outstanding Secretary award, Anna Lea Rickey had the organizational skills to launch Sole Prints Inc. However, unable to drive because of her vision problem and uncomfortable with sales, she never got the marketing and distribution end of the business off the ground.

“We did put the business up for sale, but it was mostly business brokers who called,” she said. “It’s hard to explain this business to a man. It sounds sexist, I know, but mostly they’re interested in restaurants, washing machines and machine shops, bars, things like that. They would say, ‘Horoscopes?’

“At one time we even considered it for the recycling center. . . . But it’s hard to take the lid off the box and look at the art and the color and think about putting it in the trash.”

Now that the students are taking over, the Rickeys plan to sell their home, move out of state and enjoy their time together.

Meanwhile, Ames hopes the Rickeys’ legacy will inspire other business owners, even if they cannot make similar donations, to at least let the students provide free consulting services, with faculty supervision, to local entrepreneurs.

“I’ve had people give me pieces of equipment in the past, but this is a first,” Ames said. “And it’s a marketable product, so that’s great. But just because it’s a first doesn’t mean we don’t want it to happen again.”