Mothers of invention

When our lives take a wrong turn, we often blame our mother. Not today.

The Boston Globe interviewed six entrepreneurs and their moms about their positive influences on them. Many of the entrepreneurs were featured in a new documentary, ''Lemonade Stories: Inspiring Entrepreneurs and the Mothers Who Made Them," by Boston filmmaker Mary Mazzio. There were traits common among the entepreneurs. All were type-A personalities, including when they were children. When they knew what they wanted, they single-mindedly pursued it, often by enlisting their mother's help.

Although their mothers belong to a generation that did not expect women to have professional lives, ''they all had that sense of adventure and really instilled that in their children. You ought to try new things, and if you fail, 'so what,' " said Mazzio, whose movie was commissioned by Babson College.

Arthur Blank, a founder of Home Depot, learned from his mother to be fearless. Kay Koplovitz, founder of USA Networks, picked up her stubbornness from mom. For Virgin Atlantic Airways founder Richard Branson, flamboyance was a key trait. Nantucket Nectars' Tom Scott learned fun can be put to use.

Arthur Blank Beginning at age 15, Arthur Blank watched his mother take over the family business after the sudden death of his father. Blank learned not to be afraid.

So when he set out with a partner in 1978 to create Home Depot, ''I wasn't really nervous about it," he said. ''I had a lot of confidence in myself." Home Depot currently is the world's biggest home improvement chain, with more than 300,000 employees.

After her husband died, Molly Blank, left alone with two sons, abandoned her artisitic work and helped her husband's family turn a small pharmacy wholesale business into a company with millions of dollars in sales. ''Either you go on welfare or you go out there and try to make it," she said. Her sons ''were old enough to appreciate the fact there was mother who suddenly became a business person. That imbued them with self confidence," she said.

Arthur Blank's teenage years in Queens were filled with ''stress" and ''pressure," according to a book he co-wrote with partner Bernie Marcus, ''Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion."

Blank and brother Michael grew up fast, shopping and doing laundry so their mother could work. Arthur also competed vigorously in high school football, earned As at Babson College, and rebounded after being fired from Handy Dan Home Improvement Centers. ''You can't give up the first time you're knocked down," Blank said.

Joanna Lau The piece work that Joanna Lau's mother carried home from a garment factory in New York's Chinatown taught Lau how hard life can be. Eventually, Lau escaped that plight, founding two high-technology companies.

At age 17, Lau immigrated to New York from Hong Kong with her mother and five of her seven siblings after their father died. Lau describes her mother as a ''workaholic" who ''didn't go to sleep until a job was done." Lau adopted that ethic in founding Lau Technologies, which makes face recognition technology, and in helping build a Lau spinoff, Viisage, a document security company.

Her mother, Hing Fong Chui, once led a middle-class life. Husband Joseph Lau was in the army in China but relocated his family to Hong Kong in the years following the Communist revolution in 1949. While he traveled Asia as a Caterpillar salesman, Chui was a strict mother who sometimes used a switch to keep her brood in line. She was 48 when her husband died, and her comfortable life dissolved.

She took her daughter Lina's advice to come to America and eventually went to work alongside her in a sweatshop, earning $9,000 a year. Her oldest son, Louis, in the US Army, sent home $400 a month. Chui had barely enough to get by but was too proud to apply for food stamps.

And her influence on Lau, the entrepreneur? "I came with nothing, so it's not too much of a risk," Lau said. ''If you fail, you can start all over."

Lau won scholarships to attend college at State University of New York at Stonybrook and later earned two master's degrees. As is common in Chinese culture, Chui recently moved into her daughter's Concord home, where jade carvings and framed Chinese folk art mix with western furnishings. Chui's other children often visit her there. She ''earned all the respect" of her children, Lau said.

Richard Branson Among the world's richest and most flamboyant entrepreneurs, Richard Branson built the Virgin record label and Virgin Atlantic Airways with the originality of a showman, speed-boating across the Atlantic, frolicking with show girls, donning a wedding dress -- any stunt to market his global empire.

Before Richard, there was Eve.

Eve's son mimicked her flair, developing it into a fortune estimated at $1.7 billion. At a recent photo shoot in Boston for the 25th anniversary of Babson's Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs honoring her ''wicked" son (who didn't attend), Eve Branson flirted with the camera. Hands on hips, she posed in a flaming red pantsuit. Aside from being ''the Virgin Mother" -- her son's endearment -- she said she has been a belly dancer and taught men to fly glider planes during World War II.

''I just wanted an exciting life," she said. Next, she joined the British Royal Navy, signaling war ships. Lately, she has writen two novels and adventure stories.

When Richard was growing up, he often didn't obey his mother, she said. Her son was, she said with a wink, ''a bit of quicksilver."

Now 53, Richard Branson recounted a family drive from his boyhood home in the country village of Shamley Green to grandmother's house. Eve dropped the 6-year-old on the roadside and said he should run across the farm fields to their destination.

''I got completely lost and poor mum got in a complete panic. I ended up at a farmhouse banging on the door," he said. ''I decided to teach her a lesson and delayed it as long as I could."

When the precociously hip Branson left high school to start a newspaper, The Student, to represent young adults during the foment of the 1960s, Eve wasn't happy. But when he wanted to start the Virgin record label, she pulled together money for him by selling a necklace she had found.

He used the money to produce a brilliant teenage artist: Mike Oldfield's recording became the theme song for ''The Exorcist." Branson thrived on the celebrity high life, as Virgin produced The Sex Pistols, Phil Collins, Boy George, and other superstars. In 1984, he started Virgin Atlantic Airways and the publicity stunts became fantastic. In 1986, for instance, he smashed the world record for crossing the Atlantic, in a 72-foot powerboat.

Richard said his mother ''just wanted me to stand on my own two feet."

Tom Scott Have fun, Tom Scott's mother told him. And that's what his first entrepreneurial success, Nantucket Nectars, was all about.

Scott, now 38, never seemed cut out for business, much less co-founder of the wildly successful Nantucket Nectars. The decision by him and a Brown University buddy, Tom First, to start the beverage company sprouted from their desire to scrape out a living on Nantucket, which they loved and where Scott spent summers as a child. They sold Nantucket Nectars to Ocean Spray in 1997 for a cool $70 million.

Nantucket Nectars continued Scott's many schemes growing up. He wasn't a bad kid -- just mischievous. His mother, Jane Smith, accepted it, and sometimes reveled in it. ''Tommy basically raised himself," she said. ''He would make decisions, and we were like consultants."

Scott's grade school baseball team advanced one spring to the championship game. Heading out of the house the afternoon of the big game, the 11-year-old told his mother that when his team wins, he planned to set off firecrackers he'd strung around the outfield perimeter. They did win.

Mom's reaction: ''I thought it was hysterical, so what are you going to do?"

''If I wasn't breaking the law or creating a drug problem," Tom Scott said, ''she was cool with it."

Kay KoplovitzMother and daughter could not be more different.

But the unconventional Kay Koplovitz, who wore cowgirl outfits and played sports with the boys, never doubted the love of her conventional mother, who was always proud, albeit perplexed at times by her daughter.

''My mom's favorite saying was 'Just go for it' -- Nike could've copied her," said Koplovitz, a cable industry pioneer in the 1970s. She founded USA Networks, the first advertiser-supported cable network, reaching 85 million homes today, and Sci-Fi Channel, reaching 70 million homes. The company later sold for $4.5 billion.

Koplovitz, who is 59, has no children and lives with her husband in a Manhattan penthouse with a view of Central Park.

Her mother, Jane Smith, still lives with her husband, William Smith, in the same Milwaukee home Koplovitz grew up in. Smith was a loving caretaker who made ham sandwiches for lunch when her children walked home from school. On big decisions, she deferred to her husband, an airplane parts salesman.

While she admires her mother, Koplovitz said, ''We're very different." With one exception: stubbornness. On that, ''She takes after her mother," said Smith, who is 90.

One family story revolves around Koplovitz's fierce independence -- in kindergarten. At Christmastime, the family moved to southern Milwaukee from nearby Cudahy, Wis. Koplovitz refused to leave her classmates and persuaded her father to increase her allowance so she could take the bus four miles, back to her old school. ''She tried to talk her father into lots of things," Jane Smith said.

Koplovitz was valedictorian of her high school class, which entitled her to give the graduation speech. South Milwaukee High School, departing from tradition, asked one of the boys instead. "I was so angry about it," Koplovitz recalled. Her parents talked to the principal but nothing changed. ''That was terrible," her mother said.

About her daughter's success, Smith said, ''Kay was always determined to get what she wanted. So I was really happy for her that she was going for better things."

Michela LarsonThis is a case of mother as muse. The result: Michela Larson is a partner in Sapphire Restaurant Group, which created and operates three chic Boston-area establishments, the Rialto and blu restaurants, and the Noir bar.

Her mother, Francesca Nadalini, did not keep a typical, suburban New Jersey home. Art was of utmost importance. Nadalini, who grew up in Florence, played Chopin and Gregorian chants on the hi-fi. Her children read the poetry of Thomas Wolfe and put on elaborate plays for their mother.

''You have to look for what your bliss is," her mother said during a conference call in Larson's office.

Larson, now 53, is the third of 10 siblings. There was much competition for their mother's attention. But when Larson wanted to try something -- and she tried many things before forming Sapphire Group -- mother was there. Larson swam competitively at age 5. Nadalini made sure her daughter took art, piano, and guitar lessons. She supported her daughter's desire to paint her bedroom a rosy crimson. While pregnant, Nadalini spotted her daughter when she practiced cartwheels in the backyard.

''She was a deep supporter of creativity," Larson said.

Tired of being an English teacher, Larsen consulted her mother in the 1970s about what to do next. ''What do you do when you're not working?" her mother asked. ''I said I spend my time in my kitchen," Larson said. So mom told her ''to get a job in a restaurant." Larson persuaded Another Season on Beacon Hill to hire her to cook.

She learned she was ''incapable of managing the details" of a professional kitchen, so she creates restaurants. First was a funky restaurant at the Harvard School of Public Health and then Michela's in Cambridge, before she joined Rialto chef Jody Adams and others to form Sapphire, which has been profitable since its formation in 1994. The restaurants produce revenues of up to $10 million a year. Larson oversees the restaurants' designers and is managing upcoming bar renovations at Rialto.

''You have leadership qualities," her mother told her daughter over the speaker phone.

Kimberly Blanton can be reached at blanton@globe.com.