Cindy McEntee, who operates her restaurant chain and clam chowder “factory” completely with Macs, has been named the Oregon Business Person of the Year by the Small Business Administration. And she’s one of the four finalists for the national Business Person of the year. She represented Oregon at the White House for a May 8 luncheon in the Rose Garden honoring the winners from all 50 states.
Her business is Mo’s Restaurants, which has six locations, as well as the auxiliary business selling the clam chowder base that made Mo’s famous. Serving Oregon seafood, Mo’s Restaurants are located in Newport, Lincoln City, Otter Rock, Cannon Beach and Florence. McEntee is a dedicated Mac user and has run her business on a Mac for years.
“I started with the 512 machine, then moved to a SE and a SE/30,” she told MacCentral. “The SE/30 is still used by my husband in his contracting business. Today we use an iMac, a Power Mac G4 with a flat screen, two iBooks, and a 6300 (which is used mainly to do artwork on). We use them for just about everything. We build special flyers on them. We do spreadsheets on them. We do bookkeeping on them, and more.”
The restaurateur, who also uses Macs at home, said they began using Macs for their user friendliness and have no reason to switch.
“We have quite a few people who haven’t been acquainted with computers in the past,” McEntree said. “But they can use the Macs pretty easily. We don’t have to baby-sit them. And new users can’t ‘break’ a Mac.”
Mo’s is a local legend and has played host to movie casts when they were filming on Oregon’s coast. One such flick was the 70s film, “Sometimes a Great Notion,” starring Paul Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick. The actors spent a lot of time at Mo’s.
“We got to know of them very well,” McEntee said. “I even acquired a Paul Newman signature, which no one gets.”
Those in the political arena also love Mo’s food. Senator Robert Kennedy once had it flown to him while he was on the presidential campaign trail. What’s more, in 1999 Mo’s clam chowder would be a featured entree at the first luncheon ever held in the Smithsonian Institute, which celebrated “Best American Regional Foods.”
McEntee’s grandmother, Mohava “Mo” Neimi, started the business 50 years ago. Dick Fowler of The Lasting Impression said McEntee has been a great asset to the community and is involved in several local organizations.
“She takes her employees to Hawaii every year for a week’s vacation,” he told MacCentral. “Her daughter, Gabrielle, is working into a position of higher authority in the business … perhaps the goal of many an entrepreneur.”
MyCoachOnline
MyCoachOnline, a one-stop resource for athletic programs for youths, is a total Macintosh operation.
“We’re Mac made and Mac served and if you want to watch our instructional video, you better have QuickTime cause we don’t do the other media players (the bandwidth they hog would break us; our broadband movies are only about 20 K/sec or less),” Wayne Cook of MyCoachOnline told MacCentral.
The Web site has tons of information available for coaches, parents, and athletes. There’s a digital online video library in which experts demonstrate drills and techniques that will help coaches teach the fundamental skills kids need to know. Parents and athletes can also use the free library to learn sports skills they can practice at home.
There’s free Web space for posting team schedules and a free classified ad database for sports equipment. MyCoachOnline offers fundraising hints and free Web space for fund raising. There’s sports trivia, contests, games, and much more.
Have a forward migration story? Send it to us.
Requests for help
Now it’s time for our weekly requests for help from folks who need your advice and/or assistance in forward migrating — or at least being able to keep the Mac platform alive and thriving in their businesses. Contact the requesters directly at their e-mail addresses.
Kim Trampus ( ktrampus@rcoe.k12.ca.us ): “I work in the audiovisual department of Riverside County Office of Education. I would like to know if there is a good audiovisual equipment scheduling/booking software for the Mac. We are at the present time using an old, outdated DOS-based program which is dying a slow and painful death.”