When You Don't Love Chaos

Not all entrepreneurs derive great joy from the thrill of a start-up business. Krista Ward MBA '95, JD'95 isn't an Internet entrepreneur, but she did launch her own company in 1998, and its fortunes have been related — if inversely — to the rise and fall of the dot-com economy.

Ward is the founder and chief executive officer of Skore Financial Management, LLC, an advising firm whose clients — mostly professional athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs — are mostly young and newly wealthy. They were eager to get in on Internet stocks as the NASDAQ was enjoying its rise.

"All they'd seen were great returns" on Internet start-ups, says Ward. "They had a warped perception of the concept of investing."

Ward herself took a more conservative stand. "We weren't crazy about the Internet boom," she says. And though her lack of aggression wasn't popular with some of her clients, "now we look great."

So the entrepreneurial story seems to end happily for Ward. And yet, she says, launching her own company "hasn't been all that pleasurable. I'm so tired. I've been working non-stop since 1992." In all that time, she's seen relationships with family and friends slide, and she's missed out on opportunities to travel and enjoy life. This summer, she plans to marry and take a honeymoon, which will be her first vacation in more than three years.

Still, Ward believes that, eventually, the benefits of owning her own business will outweigh the costs: "It's been very painful, but wonderfully rewarding. Or it will be wonderfully rewarding, once I'm no longer working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."

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