No Slowing Down

PROVO, Utah – Apr 21, 2020 – BYU Marriott entrepreneurship student Elizabeth Jeffrey went from raising six children as a stay-at-home mom to studying economics and accounting in the classroom. Even though she’s taken a unique path to BYU Marriott, Jeffrey knows that her education will give her the tools that she needs to make an impact on the world.

While reading her scriptures one morning, Jeffrey had a strong impression that she needed to return to school. Her family was supportive of her decision, and her youngest child, who was eight at the time, told her “Mom, if I can go to school, you can go to school.”

 Jeffrey had attended BYU for a semester before leaving school to raise a family full-time, so she decided to investigate the different programs available there. “Academic advisors showed me the list of options at BYU Marriott, and I saw entrepreneurial management,” says Jeffrey. “I knew immediately that I wanted to study entrepreneurship.” 

When Jeffrey decided to study entrepreneurship, she was already running organizations in her personal life. She operated a music school out of her home and had started Serving with Smiles, a children’s service group that prepared and distributed humanitarian kits. She was confident that entrepreneurial management would give her necessary tools to start new businesses as well as grow these existing ventures.

Even though Jeffrey already had experience in the field of entrepreneurship, returning to school was still an adjustment for her. “The most challenging aspect of this program is that the entrepreneurship major is not a normal major with reading quizzes and tests,” she says. “We focus on creating businesses that have true value, that meet customers’ needs, and that are viable. We have to figure out how to make a business successful as if we were in the real world.”

Some of Jeffrey’s current academic projects focus on starting an online classifieds website and helping an organization called Mothers Who Know grow its business. While the assignments that Jeffrey has completed through the entrepreneurship program have been challenging, they have given her the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial skills and innovate ideas that have the potential to impact the world.

Jeffrey credits BYU Marriott entrepreneurship professors Chad Carlos, Brian Reschke, and Nile Hatch for her success in the program; these professors have mentored and helped her with many of the projects that she’s tackled.In addition to her BYU Marriott workload, Jeffrey gives back to others through personal projects that are also developing her entrepreneurial skills. She’s helping her father rebuild his business while still working with her music school and children’s humanitarian group.

One of Jeffrey’s most meaningful projects outside of class has been a product called the Breath of Life, an anti-choking device that recently made the list of honorable mentions at the Student Innovator of the Year competition hosted by the Ira A Fulton College of Engineering at BYU. She has worked to complete the necessary research and to begin the process of manufacturing the product with a group of engineering students. 

While products that are intended to relieve choking already exist in the market, Jeffrey says they are bulky and hard to use. “You can use the device that my team and I created with one hand,” says Jeffrey.  “It has a push button so that you can use your other hand to either call 911 or help the victim. The device is also convenient because it's in a container the size of a lunch box.”

Jeffrey and her team plan to initially introduce the Breath of Life to nursing homes and daycare centers and then take the product to the general population. “My dream is to have it next to all the AED defibrillation boxes at malls, schools, and churches everywhere,” says Jeffrey.

As Jeffrey works to literally save lives, she also performs a different kind of lifesaving work as a mother, balancing her responsibilities at school and at home by focusing on the task at hand. “I have to compartmentalize,” says Jeffrey. “When I’m at school, I focus my attention there. When I’m at home and done with school, I don’t work on school assignments or projects.”

Even though Jeffrey keeps her academic work and family life separate, she has seen the impact of the entrepreneurship program on the lives of her family members, especially her five children who still live at home. “I've had to be innovative at home and come up with creative ways to make all of our schedules work,” says Jeffrey. “I make sure that everyone gets their jobs done and arrives at their activities. I made a job chart for my family that’s easy to navigate and helps us keep track of responsibilities.”

Both in her family and in her business endeavors, Jeffrey continues to be blessed by the skills that she has learned through the entrepreneurship program. “Before starting BYU Marriott’s entrepreneurship program, I didn’t know how to scale and grow a business,” says Jeffrey. “Now that I’ve learned those skills, I feel confident that I’ll be able to start, grow, and run my own businesses.”

Jeffrey also plans to apply her entrepreneurial skills to her continued work in the home. “I feel like running a home is definitely entrepreneurial,” she says. “I’ll keep coming up with new ideas to make things work and please the ‘customers.’”