Entrepreneur puts her efforts toward autism center in Minnesota

From The New York Times:

Most entrepreneurs gauge success in numbers like dollars and market share. Jennifer VanDerHorst-Larson (pictured) measures it, in part, in the words her son speaks and writes.

Ms. VanDerHorst-Larson is the founder of two technology companies that she expects to have combined revenue this year of $50 million and, she says, have bright prospects for 2010. But for six years, she has also lavished her entrepreneurial skills on a different sort of venture — a nonprofit organization whose guiding purpose is to help her 9-year-old son, Cade, and other children deal with autism.

In my final three columns in this space — the last one is to appear in early December — I am revisiting some of the entrepreneurs I have profiled in the last two and a half years. In September 2007, Ms. VanDerHorst-Larson described her efforts to cope with her son’s autism by creating the nonprofit Holland Center in Excelsior, Minn., for young children with the disorder.

Like any business, the Holland Center thrives on innovation. Late last year, for example, Ms. VanDerHorst-Larson created the Minnesota Hyperbaric Treatment Center to administer oxygen therapy at Holland for Cade and, so far, four of his classmates. While medical specialists are skeptical about the procedure, the results, in her view, have been stunning,

After her son’s first 20 treatments in November 2008, Ms. VanDerHorst-Larson said, “he was doing things he had never done before.”

“One day, he picked up a black pencil and said ‘black,’ ” she said. Then, he wrote down the word. “Then he said ‘orange,’ ‘red,’ and all the main colors, and even ‘gray’ and ‘pink,’ ” writing the word each time, she said. “I started crying.”

Before he began his “dives” into a high-pressure chamber for doses of pure oxygen in a process known as hyperbaric therapy, she said, he had trouble stringing more than two words together, and he shunned other children. Now, after nearly 200 dives, he has taken up singing songs and fooling around with his cousins.

Ms. VanDerHorst-Larson’s ambition is to expand Holland into a sort of virtual autism campus. Next month, it will move into new quarters that will more than triple its space to 14,000 square feet, allowing her eventually to double the number of children it serves to 40 and increase her current staff of 30 doctors, therapists, behavioral analysts and other specialists. “I’m over there every day driving the contractors crazy,” she said.

In January, she plans to open the Holland Biomedical Treatment Clinic to offer homeopathic healing and craniosacral massages of the spine and skull to the children and nutrition counseling to their parents.

She says she also intends to open a few satellite treatment centers in Minnesota with a view to a creating a second center.

Separately, she has created a foundation called Children With Autism Deserve Education, or CADE, with the aim of providing temporary aid to children whose treatment for autism is interrupted by medical insurance snags.

What is next? Ms. VanDerHorst-Larson says she will start a program at Holland for training professionals on effective ways to handle children with autism. She is investigating a role for the center in two potential research projects. She is also thinking about adopting a child, perhaps one with special needs.

To be sure, Ms. VanDerHorst-Larson, who is 38, spends much her time at her profit-making companies, Vibrant Technologies, a buyer and seller of hardware that she founded in 1998, and St. Croix Solutions, a consulting firm and provider of software that she started in 2003.

Both companies struggled in the recession but have rebounded in the fourth quarter, leading her to project revenue this year of about $30 million at Vibrant, down 25 percent from 2008, and $20 million at St. Croix, matching a year ago. Both are profitable.

Ms. VanDerHorst-Larson attributes the recent turnaround to a resumption of spending by corporations as the economy begins to pull out of the recession.

As for her entrepreneurial future, she says, “I have other ventures pending.”

I wrote about another entrepreneur, Talia Mashiach, more than two years ago as an illustration of the in-born advantages that women, especially mothers, enjoy over men in the business world. They are better listeners, motivators, networkers and multitaskers and are more focused and tenacious than their male counterparts, I argued.

Ms. Mashiach, then 30, filled the bill on all counts. She had started, in the previous 12 years, a band business, a music store, a barter firm and an events planning company called Eved, all the while bearing two sons and two daughters. She pushed herself so much that on the morning after giving birth to her fourth child, she made a call from her hospital bed to try to cut a business deal.

Today, Ms. Mashiach is still hard at work. Next month, she says, Eved, located in the Chicago area, will introduce a technology platform called Eved Online that will connect meeting planners at corporations and firms that specialize in organizing conferences with mom-and-pop service providers like caterers and florists in cities all across the world.

Eved today has 40 employees, up from 29 two years ago, though revenue this year will remain “in the low eight figures.” Even so, she believes that Eved Online will lead to substantial growth.

“For me, my dream from day one was to build a technology company on a national scale,” said Ms. Mashiach, who last month was named as one of Ernst & Young’s nine “Entrepreneurial Winning Women” for 2009. “Next year is the big year.”

As to her declaration two years ago that she wanted to have more children, she said she still does. “The fifth one is on the way.”

Success can come quickly to entrepreneurs of either sex, of course. Consider Craig Brandman, a 61-year-old cardiologist who in 2004 founded Medilinq, a provider of medical discounts for low-income people. This year, the company, based in Houston, has taken off.

In February, Dr. Brandman was upbeat. He predicted that the number of participants in the company’s network would increase to 200,000 this year from 30,000 at the end of 2008. Not only will he surpass that number, he now says, he expects an increase in revenue to $5 million this year, from $200,000 in 2008.

Dr. Brandman attributes the growth in part to a partnership that Medilinq formed this year with a company called Consult A Doctor, which gives its members round-the-clock phone access to physicians, and in part to an alliance with a debit card company whose holders gain automatic access to Medilinq’s benefits.

He is so confident about his niche in the health care industry, he said, that he plans to start his own insurance company next year, whatever the outcome of the overhaul bill before Congress.

“People are paying increasing attention to affordable health care,” he said. “The light has gone off.”