Neal St. Anthony: Busy as a firefly

Channa Kuch Tastsides, the gracious, energetic CEO, smiled and placed a bowl of chicken ensalada soup on one table. ¶ She returned briefly to the kitchen and emerged with lunch of sloppy joes and chai tea for the Merwins, a retired couple who show up for breakfast or lunch almost daily. ¶ "Enjoy, Dick and Jan," Tastsides told the Merwins, pausing to chat for a moment in what would be another 12-hour day on her feet at her Firefly Coffee Bistro on 52nd Street and Bloomington Avenue in south Minneapolis.

"I'll bet I know 200 of my customers by their first name," she said as she headed for the tiny kitchen to fetch another order. Tastsides, 33, is delighted with the business that she and her partner, Troy Lerch, opened two years ago after scraping together about $15,000 from retirement accounts and family to buy it from a previous owner.

This month, she expects to give herself her first paycheck.

Tastsides, a Cambodian refugee who immigrated to the United States with her family as a young girl, might not seem like the typical American entrepreneur.

But she is. In 2002, Nancy Carter, a University of St. Thomas researcher, and colleagues at other universities completed a multiyear study that showed that most small businesses in this country are started by women and minorities.

That was true with the predecessor to Firefly. Francine's Coffee Caffe was started in 2002 by Rosalind Lewis.

Lewis was a 59-year-old black woman who had raised a family, cooked for years in nursing homes and schools and cared for kids to cobble together a living. She had borrowed against her house to fix up the Bloomington Avenue space, and created a warm spot that featured good soups, sandwiches and baked delights.

The fellow who bought the business from her ran it as a coffee-and-rib joint. He closed it after 18 months and sold the equipment and inventory to Tastsides and Lerch. The couple, who are engaged, found the for-sale notice on a supermarket bulletin board. The two previous owners demonstrated that small business can be trying and fragile. But Firefly is already expanding. In November, an electrician who owns a building on Cedar Avenue in the Powderhorn Neighborhood, 2 miles north of Firefly, persuaded the couple with a cut-rate deal to open a second location in a vacant coffee shop. Already, business is almost as good there as it is on Bloomington Avenue, said Tastsides, who is the creative talent behind the cleverly designed small restaurants that feature an eclectic mix of American and Asian fare.

In January, Lerch quit his job with a magazine distributor he had held on to as the pair opened Firefly. They've hired two part-time waitresses. When Tastsides' mother was 33, Channa's age, she was traveling on foot by night to escape the purge of Pol Pot, the late Cambodian strongman who killed hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. Her parents were subsistence rice farmers.

Tastsides, 4 at the time, can remember being carried some of the way by friendly peasants and crossing a river into Thailand, where the family of nine lived in a refugee camp until they were sponsored for immigration by a Catholic church in Rochester.

Tastsides, a high school cheerleader who was inspired by the Mayo Clinic to be a doctor, studied science for two years at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. But she tired of the regimen and left school in 1995 to work in restaurants and catering in Minnesota, Florida and Illinois. "If I wasn't doing Firefly for me and Troy, I'd be doing it for another owner," said Tastsides. "But I had confidence that this would work. I was here every day from 6:30 a.m. until 8 at night and I saw our business build almost every day. The local businesses and neighbors have been our biggest supporters."

Carter's research, part of a multiyear study of census and other public records, concluded that blacks are 50 percent more likely than whites to start businesses. Earlier studies showed women and immigrants also are more likely to start businesses than whites. White guys proportionately are more entrenched in corporate America or successors to family businesses, although a lot of reprobates from big business also start new businesses out of love or necessity. Carter once told me: "Entrepreneurs do not look like the Marlboro Man. They look like the person next door. It doesn't matter what race or ethnicity, they want the same things: independence, self-realization -- that feeling of being in control -- and financial success."

Neal St. Anthony • 612-673-7144 • nstanthony@startribune.com