Sir Francis Drake, the famed English navigator is known for his motto “greatness from small beginnings.” No motto is more fitting for entrepreneur and businessman Stan Gloss, the CEO and co-founder of Bioteam, a high revenue company accelerating scientific research. Gloss is now used to meeting with big name clients like Biogen, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, but he would have never imagined this immense success when he was starting his first business venture (a snow shoveling service) at the age of 11. When he was diagnosed with dyslexia in third grade, Gloss struggled keeping up with the other students in his classroom. “It was the transition of learning to read to reading to learn where I hit the wall,” he says. In order to get over this wall, Gloss needed to get creative; he made study groups so he could listen to others discuss the material, he worked through study guides that he would lend to his friends, and had to do twice as much work to get half as good of grades as his peers. Feeling mostly lost in the classroom, Gloss began to gain self confidence through business.

The success of his snow shoveling business was overshadowed by his low grades and a pile of rejection letters from each college he applied to, but his resilient mind took him to get an associate degree in respiratory therapy, where his grades improved greatly because he could see the application of the studied material. Upon getting a job in the medical equipment field, Gloss realized his talent in business was matched by his talent with communication, aiding him in sales on a daily basis. Eventually, Stan made the jump to research computing, where the idea for his current company was born. He remains certain that the innovation needed to learn with dyslexia is what made him a successful entrepreneur, and believes that dyslexia should be welcomed as a challenge for people who want to become entrepreneurs, saying “Entrepreneurs are not measured by their grades, they are measured by their efforts.”

To read the interview with Stan Gloss, click here.