Michael is a lifelong entrepreneur and innovator as well as an accomplished executive manager. His entrepreneurial ventures include acquisition and restoration of historic properties, artistic production of music and theatre, and community development through grassroots organizing in his current home in the New Bohemia district of Cedar Rapids.

While living in New York City Richards honed both his entrepreneurial and management skills through executive management positions in a variety of public and private organizations including the famous Tavern on the Green, The Boathouse Cafe, Cabaret/Off Broadway Theatre, Stoneyard Institute, and The School of Sacred Arts.

But it was Mike and his wife Lynette's experience in New York City that shifted the trajectory of their lives and, in 1991, gave birth to an entrepreneurial venture that achieved national press, business, and government attention including appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Good Morning America. The venture that earned Richards this well-deserved attention was Candleworks, a labor-intensive handcrafted candle company that employed scores of homeless and "unemployable" folks in New York City.

The Candleworks social and economic experiment resulted in a viable business operation that – in addition to employing the homeless and hard-to-employ – grew and developed a strong market position in the national candle industry. Candleworks won custom manufacturing contracts for The Body Shop, Urban Outfitters, Linens and Things, Estee Lauder, Clairol and Biolage/Matrix. In addition to national television exposure, this entrepreneurial phenomenon was described in feature magazine articles in the New York Times, Success, and People magazines.

National media attention is impressive, but the true measure of Richards' accomplishment is evident by Candleworks being cited by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a National Best Practice in Community Economic Development. This award was presented by President Clinton at the National Conference of Mayors. One year later Candleworks was cited by Vice President Al Gore as the National Business of the Year for Welfare to Work.

Richards' marketing efforts during Candleworks led to his insights about the growing interest in natural products and the global need to move beyond oil and petroleum products. Since the vast majority of candles are made of petroleum-based paraffin, Mike saw the need and opportunity for an alternative natural wax.

While traditional bees' wax is natural, its production is not easily scalable, accounting for its comparative high price relative to petroleum-based paraffin. Michael then dedicated his considerable creative and entrepreneurial talents to developing the means to create commercial-grade candle wax from soybeans. And the rest, as they say and has been documented in The Oxford English Dictionary, is history*.

Michael Richards opening address at the Chandler Guild's 1st Continental Congress in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, August 22, 2003.

Timlynn and Jim share Mike's passion for business innova-tion and entrepreneurial social action. Since 1998 they have focused on envisioning and developing Small is Good Business Networks for rural and distressed urban communities.

Timlynn and Jim met as graduate students in the doctoral program in Mathematical Social Sciences at the University of California at Irvine. This domain of science has since become popularized as "social network theory" and is the strategic basis energizing the business models of such Internet mega-successes as Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

In the mid '80s they left graduate school to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in the emerging object technology and personal computing fields. Their goal was to develop technical and business skills so that they could apply social network theory to the creation of new business models and alternative markets potentially enabled by a rising global Network Economy.

Successful stints in the high tech industry in the 1990's culminated with Jim achieving certified Executive Consultant status and Timlynn gaining Senior Consultant status – both in the Object Technology Practice of IBM Global Services. By the late '90s Jim had become an industry-recognized visionary leader in the development of executable business model technologies. Timlynn's design standards and rigorous quality control processes in software developer education and apprenticeship programs were considered the industry standard for a number of years in the object technology marketplace.

In 1998 Jim and Timlynn left corporate work and redirected their lives to the front lines of the U.S. economic challenge. They founded Sohodojo – a non-profit applied research and development lab to serve the needs of solo and family-based entrepreneurs in rural and distressed urban communities.

In 2002, Michael Richards read Sohodojo's Small is Good Business Networks on-line presentations and proposed a partnership to create a decentralized small business network of soy wax candle-makers. Although unfunded, The Chandler Guild achieved a reasonable level of success before foundering. It was a good laboratory for a number of lessons learned.

Based on their work at Sohodojo, Jim and Timlynn were then recruited to found the North American Rural Futures Institute (NARFI) at Montana State University-Northern, where Timlynn as Executive Director designed and developed a five year plan for NARFI focused on a combination of NARFI-led projects and strategic collaborations. Collaborations included: The "Rise of the Creative Class in the Small," the fostering of "wind power fever" for economic development in poverty ravaged rural Montana, and extensive participation on a Northwest Area Foundation funded Ten Year Poverty Reduction Program for northcentral Montana.

At contract end in late 2004, Jim and Timlynn moved to rural southeast Iowa to extend their field research on rural economic development and family-based entrepreneurism. They reconnected with Mike and Lynette Richards, and in 2008 have come together to grow SoyaWax International into a robust and innovative industry-leading corporation.

As the CTO, Jim brings an uncanny ability to find creative technology solutions to challenging business and social needs, especially in entrepreneurial situations of limited financial and human resources. As COO, Timlynn brings her experience in executive level and project management, team development, apprentice training and mentoring, design of quality standards and rigorous quality control.

With lessons learned since 2002, Mike, Timlynn, and Jim have re-envisioned their overall business strategy and have joined together to develop SoyaWax International into an industry leader and innovator.**