“I felt like it was my obligation as a mom. I really reached out to the online community. It was really important for me to keep all the emotional connection with the moms,” she says. “The word of mom is so powerful. I want to build on that for the future.”

Eric Hansen: ‘Kick Into This Opportunity’

Eric Hansen started his business, Competitive Lawn Service Inc., when he was a teenager. Today, Hansen is a 43-year-old man and his company is a million-dollar business that maintains municipal and corporate greens in the North Chicago suburbs.

What Hansen wants is to preach an environmental message, but one geared toward profits, not tree hugging. He’s committed to using propane in his lawn equipment, reducing his greenhouse-gas emissions by 60 percent from the gasoline equipment his competitors use. That’s become a differentiator, especially when he’s selling to corporations. In 2009, his business is up 20 percent, and he's planning on 100 percent growth in 2010.

“We’d basically be dead in the water if we didn’t start doing a couple years ago what we did,” Hansen says, as he sketches out even bigger ideas. He wants to create a website that will teach others to do what he has done. He hopes that website and the information on it will become another new venture.

The grounds-maintenance business isn’t his only enterprise. He also runs a senior center and has various real estate holdings, and he had two previous businesses he sold. Until he stumbled upon the idea of using propane in his equipment, he didn’t see much growth in the lawn business. Now, he’s getting ready to take delivery of the first Ford F-350 Roush propane truck to come off the assembly line. And he's looking to Norway, perhaps, for superior propane tanks for his equipment.

As for expanding or starting a business in this economy, Hansen shrugs it off. “Don’t you think there’s actually more opportunity now?” he asks. “I’m seeing good stuff all around. I can either dwell on the death or I can kick into this opportunity.”

Christine Mason McCaull and Chip Roberson: ‘That Urge to Create’

Christine Mason McCaull and Chip Roberson were already tech vets, living in the town of Sonoma, California, when they met while volunteering on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

“She and I just hit it off,” says Roberson, 46. “We both saw the promise of technology. We became very enamored of how successful we became in the (Obama) campaign using Web 2.0 software.”

They put their backgrounds to good use. McCaull had been, among other things, chief executive of four venture-backed technology firms. Roberson has worked on everything from satellites to switches to open-source software and was a founder of the optical equipment maker Cerent, which was sold to Cisco for $7.2 billion in 1999.

Their first project as partners was a nonprofit social network for their own community, Wired Sonoma. But they soon found people asking for their advice on social-networking issues, and they saw a business opportunity.

“Christine and I started realizing there were some real challenges,” Roberson says. And McCaull says her previous experience in a web-based startup convinced her she could get a business going driving awareness and traffic for businesses more cost-effectively than using Google AdWords.

The pair created ClickMarkets, which develops and offers software for a company to market using social media and measure the effects.

They formed their partnership in Spring 2009, soft-launched the company in September, and hired their first two contract employees last month. Already, they have 12 clients—mostly small and mid-sized businesses—and are putting in place the processes to grow further.

“It’s that urge to create…it’s just such an exciting place to be,” McCaull, 43, says “Making something out of nothing, it’s sort of the theme.”