When Earlene McGonegal sold her first company, Coordinated Care Services, to a public corporation in 1995, she got an impressive vice president title and a seat at the decision-making table.

But she quickly found herself frustrated with the long corporate deliberations.

What to Ask Do you really love it? It’s the difference, says University of Akron’s Bob Chalfant, “between someone with an idea and someone with a dream.” Are you doing too much? “If you have your hands in too many companies, you’re not doing any of them well enough to be successful,” says JumpStart’s Ted Frank. Is your family behind you? The hours. The stress. The risk. Can your family endure another startup? What do you want to get out of it? Build it and sell it? Pass it down? Chase your dream this time? Your motives will drive your plan.

“When you’re in business for yourself, you can make decisions like this,” she says, snapping her fingers. “I was jumping out of my chair. I wasn’t in charge.”

She left the company, spent time away and leapt back into entrepreneurship, co-founding Midwest Medical Staffing, which provides medical staff for correctional facilities.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998, it made her think, How do I want to live my life? “It was a gift,” she says.

McGonegal, now 61, still seems surprised to hear herself described as a serial entrepreneur. She certainly never anticipated entrepreneurship in her youth.

The oldest of six from a farming family in tiny Knoxville, Ohio, McGonegal chose nursing as the career to get her off the farm and into the world. She worked in hospitals in Cleveland and Birmingham, Ala., before landing at a long-term care provider in Canton under the wing of a mentor who nurtured her management skills.

“I said, ‘I’m a good nurse, but I don’t know anything about business,’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘I’ll teach you everything you need to know.’ ”

He gave McGonegal opportunities to learn his business and encouraged her to get her degree. In 1992 she earned her MBA and left her 14-year employer to co-found Coordinated Care Services, which provided on-site wellness programs in retirement communities.

The autonomy appealed to McGonegal after her years on the farm. “It was that sense of freedom, of not having to report to someone else,” she says. “That’s something I inherited from my father.”

Yet McGonegal also credits strong partnerships with her co-founders and support network as critical to her business successes. “I’ve always tried to surround myself with people who knew things I didn’t know,” she says.

McGonegal is currently winding down Midwest Medical Staffing as corrections trends toward on-payroll medical staff. Her final contract, with the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, ends in 2011.

That doesn’t mean she won’t start another business.

“It would have to be something I really enjoy,” says McGonegal. “Life’s too short.”

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