Business

Jen Welch looked around the bar she and her fiance Bill Watry own in the Village of Fredonia last week.

“Never in a million years would I have thought this is what I’d be doing, but here I am, living my best life,” Welch said.

As of Sept. 1, the couple are owners of Jen’s Place, the former Barb’s Pub and Grub on Fredonia Ave.

Karen Onan is an accountant by trade, but after 40 years in the business she realized “I was just tired of it,” she said.

She wasn’t ready to retire, so Onan began looking for a new line of work, and she found it in The Spice and Tea Exchange, a shop she and her husband Roby will open next to Duluth Trading Co. at the corner of Grand Avenue and Franklin Street in downtown Port Washington on Friday, Oct. 13.

“I wanted to work somewhere that’s fun. This is the funnest job ever,” Onan said last week as she and her staff were stocking the shelves and organizing the shop.

When Elizabeth Mueller saw that the Grafton Area Chamber of Commerce was advertising for a new special events and tourism coordinator last spring, she knew it was the job for her.

“I showed it to my husband and he said, ‘they wrote that for you,’” Mueller, who has a degree in public relations and marketing and a background that includes running her own business and staging consumer shows for businesses, said.

Mueller got the job and has excelled — so much so that the Chamber board of directors tapped her to fill the shoes of outgoing longtime Executive Director Pam King.