Striking a chord

When Virginia Hunt Davis was 11 years old, she learned a business lesson that sparked her entrepreneurial spirit.

"I had a firewood chopping business," Davis recalls of her childhood. "My dad would pay me $10 an hour to chop firewood. One evening, I went to the Exxon station with him, where he sold the wood -- the wood that I had chopped and neatly stacked and arranged in the truck bed -- for more than $100. I said, 'But I just did all that for $40. Where's my cut?' And my dad looked at me and said, 'Well, I own the tree.' So, from that point on, I've been trying to own the tree."