Reposted from Business First (Business First 29 April 2011 PDF)

WHEN YOU SEEK investors to start a company, you give away control and profit. That’s not acceptable or necessary for some business owners, who get going on a lean budget often funded personally.

BY CINDY BENT FINDLAY | FOR BUSINESS FIRST

Technology has made creating a business out of little more than time and electrons more feasible than ever.

Many entrepreneurs chase the dream of finding millions in venture capital to launch their product. But those who’ve been there before say bootstrapping – pulling a business up “by its bootstraps” with little or no startup cost – is a model well worth considering.

“I think many entrepreneurs think they need venture capital and they don’t completely understand what that entails,” said Will Indest, vice president of venture development for TechColumbus, the regional high-tech advocacy nonprofit and incubator. “First, it’s hard to get. Generally there are not investors chasing companies – it’s the other way around.

“Then, I think a lot of times when people realize what venture capital is, what you have to give up, they go another route. The thing is to find a way to get the best capital into the company, and that’s to sell something to somebody,” he said.

Some concepts, such as medical devices or high-tech materials, take years to develop and have high startup costs that require big upfront investments, all before products ever reach the market – if they ever do.

“But in the web world, people don’t need as much cash to test market assumptions as you used to. It’s cheaper to host, build and manage websites, making it more possible to bootstrap,” said Rob Emrich. Emrich speaks from experience. He’s in talks to sell his fourth self-funded startup, Bulx, a private sale website for high-end home goods.

“If we had started this same company in 1998, the market would be smaller, hosting ex- pensive. Web engineers and technology would be more ex- pensive,” Emrich said.

The first business Emrich bootstrapped was a nonprofit, Road of Life, which he started after losing a sister and a cousin to cancer.
“It was a classic entrepreneur story – I sold my car, my stocks, hired a friend, and with $2,500 we set out with the goal to make a difference in the fight against cancer,” Emrich said.

He started the company, which creates health education content for use in schools, in 2002 when still a senior at Ohio State University. He had the help of friends and enthusiastic college interns. Emrich said Road of Life has distributed curricula aimed at cancer prevention to more than 250,000 students.

Emrich’s next entrepreneurial venture was Speakersite, an online, au-tomated market for public speakers which he founded with Artie Isaac, founder of advertising agency Young Isaac, which later was acquired by People to My Site. Emrich said they started that business almost solely with time.

Emrich said the key to starting Speakersite with very little financial investment was to build up a social network of speakers that could become the inventory. Social media made it possible to listen closely to what the market wanted and let the product evolve, he said.

Speakersite now helps 4,000 public speakers find gigs and takes a small commission from each. Emrich also started Boundaryless Brands, a business-to-business e-commerce firm. Both are housed at TechColumbus and both, he said, have been profitable from the beginning.
In building Speakersite, Emrich and his team tested the assumption that speakers would be willing to pay for online listings and then asked what those speakers would want out of a membership.

“The answer we got back was ‘Help me get more jobs.’ So we built a business around that,” Emrich said.

If he’d started the business with a big bang of capital, Emrich said, he probably would not have the flexibility to let the company evolve into its most profitable possibilities.

“The bootstrapping route is basically about having a testable set of assumptions, proving or disproving them, and moving forward,” Emrich said.

GOING HOME SOBBING
The second key to bootstrapping a business is to put as much revenue back into the company as possible, Emrich said, and not expect a return quickly.

Jeni Britton Bauer came to some of the same conclusions about her business, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, although she didn’t intend to start out that way.

Bauer said in the beginning, it was clear her calling was to make transcendent ice cream, not necessarily to build an empire. And the process of slowly growing her business in a method as homemade as her ice cream was born of necessity.

Bauer and her husband (then boyfriend) scrimped and saved to purchase a $1,200 ice cream maker and made batch after batch of her best, and then presented it to a family friend who she hoped to convince to invest enough to help her start a stand in the North Market.

“They loved it. They offered me the money, but then my friend said – ‘But don’t take it. If I give you money I’m going to want something back, part of your company. Go find the money somewhere else.’ I went home sobbing,” Bauer says.

Bauer realized her friend was right. She ground out a business plan and the beginnings of a wholesale client base of local restaurants. Fear of failure – Bauer had already been a part of one failed ice cream shop – kept her focus on selling what she had and putting as much back into the business as possible.

A year of wholesaling and loan applications later, she said, she and her husband won a Small Business Administration loan and Jeni’s was born.

Fast forward eight and a half years, and Bauer’s company has 10 locations, $5.8 million in 2010 sales, and a book coming out through one of the world’s premier cookbook publishers, Workman.

But constant reinvestment in the business and ultraconservative use of resources and debt have been the keys to success.

“And I mean you have to outgrow resources by like a year before you buy anything else,” Bauer said. “I always think we should be happy to have what we have. If we were in Tokyo, we’d be doing twice what we do with half the space.”

GOING YOUR OWN WAY
Jeni’s brought in John Lowe as CEO in 2009 to allow Bauer to chart the creative side of the business, but the company has not taken a dime in outside capital through the long climb to success, despite frequent inquiries from hopeful financiers.

“Our growth will be lumpy,” said Lowe. “We will almost always grow to a point that it is time for us to add people or infrastructure, and then we place another bet that we can afford that. Each little step in growth is a risk for us so we have to be cautious about the way we spend the money or reinvest in the company.”

Bauer said looking back, she would not have started any other way. She’s always intended Jeni’s to be her career for life, and venture capital would mean letting go.

But just as importantly, Jeni’s wouldn’t be what it is with the pressure outside funding brings.

“If we decide to make ice cream that is ungodly expensive to make, like goat cheese with cognac and figs, we can do so. And we don’t have to answer to someone else about the bottom line,” Lowe said.

“If we’d had $6 million to start, the whole business would have been totally different,” Bauer said. “We’d have wanted to be big fast. I wouldn’t have worked the front line for eight years like I did, made the connections that I did. You don’t get any of that culture. You have to find a way that works immediately to satisfy your investors and worry about 20 percent growth and 20 percent profit, which we’ve never done. Our standards of success are completely different than that world.”

CINDY BENT FINDLAY is a freelance writer.

PDF Version

Rob Emrich, the Cleveland native who created a foundation aimed at teaching kids about cancer prevention, is a stand-up guy — literally.

The 27-year old founder/chairman of Road of Life, a nonprofit agency with a mission to educate children about cancer prevention, doesn’t even have a desk chair in his downtown Columbus office. Instead, he stands up while working on his podium-mounted computer, taking phone calls, and overseeing his 12-person operation.

Perhaps Emrich’s upright work habit is emblematic of his commitment to “take a stand” against cancer. At age 7, the Shaker Heights native lost his two-year old sister Keren to neuroblastoma, a pediatric cancer of the nervous system. His parents, Joyce and Ron, established a concert series at the former Temple Beth Am in her memory, and Emrich wanted to continue that tradition in one form or another.

While he was in college at The Ohio State University, taking classes in philosophy and deciding on a career path, cancer hit home again – twice. His cousin, a young rabbi in Calgary, died of the disease, and soon after, his mother had a cancer scare of her own.

He decided to organize a fund-raiser with the goal of making “a substantial difference” in the fight against this dreaded disease. However, while researching fund-raising ideas, he learned there was “almost no work being done in the field of cancer prevention and even less for kids.” This struck a chord with the tall, blond young man who lost his little sister so long ago.

“One out of three people develop some sort of cancer in their lives,” he says, “and one out of two (cancers) can be prevented.”

So instead of creating a fund-raising event, Emrich began plans for a bigger organization that would combat cancers in another way. In 2002, the enterprising young man sold his car and $5,000 worth of stocks his grandparents had given him, hires his best friend Matt Youngner (another Shaker Heights High School grad), and started the Keren Emrich Foundation. The foundation spawned Road of Life, an organization whose mission is to “educate children about the smoking, fitness and nutrition decisions they can make to lead a healthier life.”

The ultimate goal, says Emrich, is to raise a healthier generation of young people with “a significantly lower risk of developing cancer and diseases of excess.”

Road of Life offers interested educators a free, comprehensive, 22-lesson health curriculum. Lesson #10, for example, compares the nutritional value of water and soda pop, using activities like relay races and experiments with fresh fruit.

Two full-time employees of Road of Life, a social worker and a health-education specialist, create the lessons, which are then approved by the organization’s board of directors. This fall, educators all over the country will be able to access the lessons via the Internet.

The group is also finalizing plans to provide all its health content for TeachForward, an online community developed at Harvard University. With TeachForward, educators can post their own lessons and search for, rate, and discuss lessons with teachers across the country.

It’s a misconception that all kids learn about eating their veggies and the importance of exercise during their regular gym and health classes, says Emrich. Lower income school districts, for example, don’t always make health education a priority.

“Ohio doesn’t really have health academic standards, especially for students ages 9-12,” he says.

To date, Road of Life has piloted its program in a number of schools around Columbus. Among other positive results, “we found that the program made students 26% more likely to know that smoking makes it harder to succeed at exercise and sports and 40% more likely to report eating fruits and vegetables every day,” says Emrich.

In April, the nonprofit received a $10,000 grant, one of 50 Compassion Capitol Project sub-award grants by the Ohio Governor’s Office of Faith and Community Based Initiatives. Road of Life is no stranger to grant money; in fact, most of the organization’s overhead is funded via federal grants.

In late 2005, Road of Life officially launched the “Extending the Road of Life” campaign to raise additional funds. The group’s goal is $1.4 million, and currently “we have commitments for over half,” Emrich says.

Because the organization didn’t want to depend on special events for funding, Road of Life focuses more on major gifts and corporate sponsorships.

Emrich’s organization is currently experiencing some significant growing pains, and its founder couldn’t be prouder. He plans on opening an office in Cambridge, Mass., this fall, and he’s slowly but consistently added new hires to his young staff.

Emrich would like to continue Road of Life’s national expansion and “create a sustainable organization without my being here,” he says. In the meantime, he’s being lauded for his work. He was recognized as one of Columbus’ “40 Under 40″ by Business First newspaper, and he served as a delegate at the World Health Congress. In his spare moments, Emrich also chairs the Young Jewish Professionals board of the Columbus Jewish Federation and sits on its Overseas Allocation committee.

Emrich’s Jewish background influenced his decision to start Road of Life, he says. “My parents and grandparents told me I need to be a mensch and do what’s right.” With the Road of Life, Rob Emrich certainly seems to be headed in the right direction.

Read the full PDF article on Rob Emrich from the Cleveland Jewish News.

He was a prep cook in an Israeli kitchen, a construction worker and a campaign manager for a woman running for a seat in the Ohio House. Rob Emrich was a congressional page, a political and business consultant and an emergency medical technician who ran for the Columbus City Council. He’s been a molecular-genetics researcher, an educator and lecturer, and a member of committees for such causes as the Tobacco Public Policy Center and the Columbus Jewish Federation.

And Emrich founded Road of Life, a nonprofit agency that teaches cancer prevention to fourth-graders. He’s 26 years old. Emrich said his ambition and strength to try new things came through a series of events that changed his perceptions of who he was and what he wanted to be. When he was 7 years old, his 2-year-old sister, Keren, died of complications from neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system.

“It was a dark cloud that was always there,” said his mom, Joyce Emrich. “It changed all of us.”

Rob Emrich grew up in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. Joyce teaches in Cleveland and his father, Ron, is a former chemist who now works as a computer analyst. He has a brother, Michael, 23, and a sister, Alexandra, 15. After graduating from high school in 1997, Rob Emrich decided to take a year to go to Israel and travel.

He worked on a kibbutz, a farm where all work is done collectively, in Jerusalem. On his second day there, during a trip to a popular market, three Palestinian suicide bombers dressed as women set off explosives strapped to their bodies. Emrich took cover and was unharmed by the blasts, which killed three Israelis and an American and injured 200. For months after his stay at the kibbutz, he said, he jumped at every loud noise.

“You have no idea how many things you take for granted,” Emrich recalled thinking after he came home.

After working in construction for a few months, he took a 1,000-mile hike from Georgia to New York along the Appalachian Trail. He said the three month trip helped him focus.

“I was processing things,” he said, “reinforcing to myself the decision to do good work that had an impact.”

In 1998, he went to Ohio State University, where he majored in philosophy and pre-med. In 2000, he returned to Israel to study at the BenGurion University of the Negev. But it wasn’t long before the United States imposed a travel warning, and his visit was cut short. It was about this time that his cousin Seth died of a brain tumor. Rob Emrich said the death spurred him to raise money for cancer research.

“There’s two directions you can go in,” he said. “Get over your anger and be stronger, or let it affect you your whole life.”

He sold his car and some stocks for about $5,000 — just enough for startup costs — and created the Keren Emrich Foundation in his sister’s name.

“I didn’t want to start an organization,” he said. “I just wanted to make a significant difference in cancer research.”

He rounded up his friends, the “best and the brightest” he knew, and asked for their help. Matt Youngner, who has known Emrich since they were classmates at Shaker HeightsHigh School, didn’t hesitate to join.

“It seemed cool, interesting, fun, memorable,” Youngner said. “Not knowing what you’re going to get paid, it’s part of the adventure.”

Their work led to Road of Life, the group within the foundation that teaches children how to prevent cancer. The programming is simple: Volunteers from OhioState teach fourth-graders about smoking prevention, nutrition and exercise. Last year, Youngner, executive director of Road of Life, and Emrich launched a pilot program at Franklinton Alternative and Hubbard elementary schools. Michael Emrich, who is studying political science and international studies at OhioState, set up a Road of Life chapter at OSU and rounded up volunteers.

“I’ve learned so much from my brother and Matt,” Michael Emrich said. “It’s just the idea of turning an idealist thought into reality.”

Rob Emrich said he hopes to spread the program to all fourth-graders in Columbus this fall and eventually across Ohio. Since 2002, Road of Life has raised more than $500,000 to support cancer-prevention programming. Emrich walked 312 miles from Cincinnati to Cleveland to raise money for the program.

“He’s devoted the best years of his life to a cause while most people his age are just trying to make money,” his mother said. “He was born with this strong spirit, and it just gets stronger.”

His success has led a number of groups to ask him to join their boards and committees. In his spare time, Emrich goes to the gym and hangs out with friends in his Italian Village apartment, hikes with his dog, Calvin, and keeps up with politics. In August, he was one of 29 candidates to turn in applications for the City Council seat left open by Richard W. Sensenbrenner’s departure. Although he didn’t make the cut, Emrich said he still sees politics in his future.

But for right now, he’s content with the journey that Road of Life has in store for him.

See the full PDF article on Rob Emrich in the Columbus Dispatch.

Rob Emrich, Founder and Chairman of The Keren Rebecca Emrich Foundation, dba Road of Life: Cancer Prevention for Kids, is honored as one of Columbus’ Forty Under 40, based on the nomination of Carleen Taylor, customer service for Labcorp.

After witnessing family and friends suffering and dying from cancer, 25-year-old Rob Emrich decided that he would try to make a difference. Selling his car and personal stocks, Rob created Road of Life, a nonprofit organization devoted to increase cancer prevention and awareness and support for underfunded cancer researchers.

Road of Life educates children about fitness and nutrition decisions. It also strives to raise a generation of children with a significantly lower risk of cancer.

Road of Life is best known for its 312-mile relay walk across Ohio. Held in the spring, the event culminates a year of study for fourth graders and their college mentors that focuses on fitness and cancer prevention. The fund-raiser also raises awareness for cancer prevention in children in under-served communities.

Road of Life created and piloted a curriculum focusing on cancer prevention techniques for two Columbus Public Schools that was designed to meet Ohio proficiency standards. Additionally, Rob helped raise more than 350,000 in funding and in kind donations to fund Road of Life’s Mission, including grants from the AmeriCorp Vista Program and the Columbus Foundation.

During 2003 and 2004 Rob was a member of the Social Entrepreneurship Panel for City Year Columbus. He was a seminar speaker at the John Glenn Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the Columbus Jewish Federation’s Overseas Allocations Committee.

In 2003, Rob was selected by Northern Ohio Live as a recipient of the Time to Care – Four People Whose Bright Ideas Bring Light to Others. He received the Katz Fellowship from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beer-Sheva. Israel, for bio-ethics.

See the complete PDF article from Columbus Business First.

On top of a small hill in central Ohio, between Danville and Wooster, two men in a beat-up pickup truck pull up beside Rob Emrich. They hand him an apple, two crumpled dollar bills and some loose change. “It’s all we’ve got,” one says before speeding off down the road. This exchange didn’t last more than 30 seconds, but for someone walking across the entire state of Ohio, small gifts like these make all the difference.

A year and a half ago, cancer struck Emrich close to home for the second time in his life. His cousin Seth, a rabbi from Canada with a wife and two kids, died of a brain tumor. “I was one of the people at the funeral shoveling dirt into his grave, and I still remember the thud of the dirt hitting the coffin,” Emrich says. “That’s still with me, and the sound, the rhythm of that thud stays with me, especially when I’m walking – and often that’s the pace I walk at.”

The first time Emrich had dealt with cancer was the death of his sister Keren, who was two and a half years old when she succumbed to neuroblastoma, a form of cancer that affects the nervous system. Emrich was six years old at the time.

Thus, 19 months ago, Emrich founded a nonprofit organization, Road of Life, devoted to cancer prevention and awareness as well as to the support of underfunded cancer researchers. Having worked in a lab as an Ohio State honors student in philosophy, Emrich knew how difficult getting funds from the government and private foundations can be for younger, less-established researchers. “The young researcher I worked for had a good background and a lot of good ideas,” Emrich said during his walk toward Columbus. “We talked about what an ideal system of funding would be: one designed by researchers and for researchers.”

He intends to help fund researchers whose innovative ideas get overlooked relative to larger, more traditional labs. But his new grant-giving foundation, the Keren Rebecca Emrich Cancer Research Foundation, is years away from writing checks. For this reason, Emrich walked 312 miles this past September, from the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati to the shores of Lake Eerie beside Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. His walk was just a beginning for the Road of Life, the fund-raising arm of the foundation, which solicits the support of private individuals as well as corporations that want their brand to be affiliated with such a cause.

In conjunction with educational programming aimed at both college students and fourth-graders, Emrich hopes to travel across Ohio again next summer, walking with people in each major city and in rural areas. Along the way, he will offer cancer prevention outreach to under-served communities. Eventually, he plans to begin walking the 16,000-mile Pan-American Highway, from southern Argentina to northern Alaska.

Born in Delaware in 1979, but raised in Shaker Heights, Emrich was an avid adventurer and outgoing child. He played hockey throughout high school and also became an Eagle Scout. Before entering the Ohio State honors program in 1998, Emrich hiked most of the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to New York. The following year, at Ohio State, he earned an Emergency Medical Technician certificate to work in ambulances. During his third year of college, he studied in Israel, concentrating on medical ethics. He camped and hiked whenever he had spare time.

By the time Emrich was back in Columbus, studying for his medical school entrance exams, he had already made the decision to create Road of Life. “About a year ago, I was looking around to see what my friends were doing and seeing what type of effect they were having on society. I know my friends are talented and thoughtful, and I was sort of disappointed that they were not using their talent and thoughtfulness to make change.”

Emrich felt there were not enough opportunities for young people to make direct, positive changes to the world. “I saw that people could join a large nonprofit and become a small part of a larger machine and do menial jobs. And I saw their youthful idealism wasn’t really being utilized.” Other friends decided it would be better to try to earn more money, in order to support the philanthropy later in life. For Emrich, Road of Life is a way for young people to make an immediate impact on society.

This summer’s 17-day walk was only one part of Road of Life, which has employees and office space in Columbus. Along the walk, Emrich’s friend Matt Youngner, who is the chief executive of Road of Life, and his brother Mike set up information booths at Ohio colleges to get young people to form Road of Life chapters on campuses throughout the state.

During Emrich’s walk across the state, Road of Life also hosted a mile-dedication program on its website, www.roadoflife.org. For each of the 312 miles he walked, people could dedicate one mile in honor of someone who either survived or was lost to cancer. Once all the spots were filled, people could continue posting names. A resolution in the Ohio Statehouse, where Emrich had been an intern, as well as in the Senate, commemorated the names and recognized the walk as part of the official state record.

This kind of effort – remembering people’s names and getting local communities involved – is what Emrich hoped to do by founding the organization. The effect on him was palpable along the walk. He met many people who recognized him from the local coverage he received and would wish him well as he walked.

One energetic blond woman in her mid-40′s stopped him to shake his hand introduce herself as a cancer survivor. A few miles from Akron, on state Route 585, an elderly couple in a blue two-door car pulled over onto the shoulder a few feet in front of Emrich. Confirming that he was the man the couple had heard about earlier that day, the husband said, “We heard on the radio what you’re doing and want to let you know you’re a hero to us.” With the sun setting at his back as he headed northeast, Emrich marched on, with about 70 miles left to Cleveland.

As he walks, he points out the many landmarks and commemorative plazas for cancer survivors, but none for those who succumbed to the disease. One of Emrich’s main goals is to change this, and he wants to start by having cancer survivors and families that have lost loved ones come together during next year’s walk across Ohio.

“Everyone knows someone who’s been touched by cancer, but there’s not necessarily a way for all these people who’ve been personally touched to interact – and, while I see that as a lofty goal, I see that as one of the main goals of Road of Life.”

This summer, the walk will be considerable different. The cornerstone will be Road of Life’s fourth-grade curriculum, which tries to teach students the state’s geography as well as healthy, cancer-preventing lifestyle choices, like eating well and exercising regularly. College students will mentor the fourth-graders and implement the curriculum. They will also walk with the youngsters at different points along the way with Emrich.

In Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland, there will be long walks held as fund-raisers for Road of Life. Emrich welcomes and encourages all to come next year and participate. “It’s time for everyone to get involved in the fight. Give your time, make a donation, teach others, change your lifestyle: Get involved and make a difference.”

Read the full PDF article profiling Rob Emrich and the Walk For Cancer.

This month, in sync with Ohio’s Bicentennial, Rob will walk the 312 miles from downtown Cincinnati to Cleveland using a combination of bicycle paths and quieter roads. The walk, the first step in a program that may be taken to a national and even international level, is one of many initiatives the group’s founders want to accomplish.

As well as demonstrating the role fitness plays in health, the group is participating in school and college health fairs throughout the state featuring multimedia presentations on cancer facts and research. Rob will appear at each of the health fairs and will make appearances of other events, such as city festivals, along his route.

Next year, Rob hopes to take on a longer walk – the Pan-American Highway, which stretches from Alaska to Argentina – following in the footsteps of Briton George Meegan, who completed the route in the 1970′s. The group is working with Ohio State University’s Center for Latin American Studies developing a web curriculum that will help get its anti-cancer message to a wider audience.

Right now though, the friends’ goal is to raise funds for the first 312 mile walk; they aim to raise $100 per mile by October 1. For more information on Road of Life, or to dedicate a mile of the walk in honor or memoriam of a cancer sufferer, please visit www.roadoflife.org, email Office@roadoflife.org, or telephone (614) 221-1235.

For the complete article, please read the full PDF Shaker Life Magazine Features Rob Emrich.

Rob Emrich, founder of Road of Life, begins trek in memory of his sister.
Rob Emrich is the sort of guy who might decide to walk from Cincinnati to Cleveland for no particular reason at all.

But the 24-year-old Columbus resident, an avid hiker and bicyclist, had good reason to set off from Great American Ball Park Thursday on a 312-mile trek from one end of Ohio to the other.

It is the memory of his sister, who died 17 years ago from neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nerve cells, and his hope that he can teach thousands of other Ohioans about cancer detection and prevention that will keep him going for the next 16 days.

“So many people think that cancer is something that you get and then you automatically die,” Emrich said.

“I want them to know there is hope.”

Emrich’s mission to educate others about cancer prevention and treatments was born in the pain and bewilderment he felt as a 7-year-old boy, watching his sister die and not understanding why.

After four years as a pre-med and philosophy student at Ohio State University, he was working at the university’s cancer research lab when he founded the Keren Rebecca Emrich Cancer Research Foundation. The non-profit organization, named after his sister, markets a cancer prevention program for college students and an educational curriculum aimed at fourth-graders.

His walk across Ohio, called “Road of Life,” is sponsored by private individuals and foundations. Individuals can dedicate a mile of Emrich’s walk to a loved one who died of cancer on the organization’s Web site.

Thursday, Emrich, clad in a bright yellow T-shirt and red bandanna and leaning on two fiberglass walking poles, set off toward the east on Pete Rose Way on the first 17-mile leg of his journey.

He walked down Eastern Avenue through the East End and up Wooster Pike through Fairfax and Mariemont before calling it a day in Milford.

Today, he will hike up the Little Miami River bike trail from Milford, which will land him in Xenia by Sunday afternoon.

Then, the journey zigs-zags through towns such as Cedarville, Westerville and Akron before ending on Sept. 20 at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

“There’s going to be a big party there when I arrive,” said Emrich. “Maybe I’ll jump in the lake.”

By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer