The day Lisa Collum started her side hustle in 2011, she went to OfficeMax and bought five binders with the last $99 in her checking account, she says.
She filled them with copies of her fourth- and fifth-grade writing curricula, sliding pages reading “Top Score Writing by Lisa Collum” into the front plastic covers. As she sold them, the five binders became 10, then 20. Within five years, she was selling hundreds at a time from her living room’s makeshift assembly line, with her 8-year-old operating the three-hole-punch.
Today, Collum, 41, is the CEO of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida-based Top Score Writing, which sells K-12 writing curricula and consulting services to schools and teachers across all 50 U.S. states, she says. Her teaching approach comes from her experience helping fourth graders — many of whom spoke English as a second language — write highly structured essays, and watching their writing test scores rise, she says.
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