Principal and Producer Jennifer Isenhart is a fourth generation entrepreneur. She also happens to be the great grand daughter of one of the first cinematographers in the Pacific Northwest.
Media mogul Ted Turner says an entrepreneur is what you call yourself when you don’t have a job. By that definition, I come from a long line of jobless people. As far back as my great grandfather, my family members have created their own opportunities with fresh ideas and a lot of long, hard work.
My great grandfather moved from Wales to Wyoming in 1898. Lewis Mortimer Lewis was his name. He was just 11 years old when he moved to America, ready to take on a new world. On that long voyage across the ocean, he carefully tended to his first business idea– one large box of live worms. Upon landing in America, he immediately went to work farming Welsh worms and selling them to local fishermen. I don’t know if they worked any better than American worms, but they launched my great grandfather into the world of business.
By the time my great grandfather Lewis was 20 years old he had put himself through college, graduated with a degree in business and purchased a private business college in Washington State. Through his hard work and determination, the college grew and thrived and he became partner in another business college in Chicago. By the time he was 30 years old, my great grandfather was a wealthy man.
But it wasn’t until the great depression hit that he found his true passion. That’s when Lewis M. Lewis picked up a motion picture camera. He was instantly hooked.
Roy Ash, co-founder of Littleton Industries says, “an entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.”
That was my great grandfather. In the 1930’s, he taught himself how to be a cinematographer and set out around the Northwest selling film productions to businesses and government agencies. He used a Bell & Howell Filmo movie camera and shot films for many of the newly created national parks. He was the first cinematographer to shoot film footage of the recently opened Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. In the 1930’s, visitors to the park had to be lowered down hundreds of feet in a guano mining bucket– about the size of a whiskey barrel– to enter the caves. That must have been an interesting ride down with two arms full of camera equipment.
Lewis M. Lewis excelled at nature photography and went on to sell his footage to the Walt Disney company for a nature series called, The Living Desert. Over the years, my great grandfather started and developed numerous other businesses, but photography always remained a passion throughout his life.
Nolan Bushnell, the founder of the Atari company says about entrepreneurs, “The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”
Both of my parents inherited the ‘doer’ gene. One day in the basement of my great-grandfather’s house, my father stumbled upon a small treasure that would point his ambition toward a familiar course. It was the old Bell & Howell Filmo camera. My father didn’t know it yet, but that day in the basement marked the beginning of a 30 year career in film, then television, then video production. Together with my mother (and a lot of hard work), they built a successful documentary and corporate production company in the Puget Sound area.
I grew up in and around television stations, camera equipment and editing bays. I remember getting in trouble when I was a little girl for playing with my dad’s white editing gloves, the ones he wore when handling the film on the flat bed editing table in our basement. I learned to splice and tape a film edit when I was in grade school. So it just made sense when I went to college to chose a major in broadcast journalism.
Now it’s my turn to carry the entrepreneurial family torch. Over the past 13 years, with long hours (and a lot of hard work), my husband and I have built a strong, creative production company that is innovative enough to thrive during these tough economic times. When it comes to examining my own success, I like what the founder of The Body Shop, Anita Roddick has to say, “success… is not about money or status or fame, it’s about finding a livelihood that brings me joy and self-sufficiency and a sense of contributing to the world.”
For me, success is also a sense of contributing to and carrying on my own family legacy. A legacy that appears to be alive and well. This summer my 7 year old daughter Gwendolyn got to work with a business of her own. In a single hour she pulled in more than seven dollars with a small stand selling peach ice tea. That night, she informed me that selling ice tea in the hot sun is a lot of hard work. I just had to smile. I think our family legacy lies in good hands.
