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I was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the ninth of nine children. My father was a truck driver and my mother was a cook before they retired. My childhood and teenage years were spent during the socialist regime, when owning a business was not even a dream. The government at that time owned everything. A household in the countryside could own up to 36 livestock; if the number was more than 36, they had to hand the extras over to the government, no matter how desperately they needed the extra livestock to feed the family.

By the time socialism ended and people were permitted to own private businesses, my parents were at retirement age. They had no savings from their long employment to the government, and only a little bit of monthly allowance as their retirement security--that was the sour fruit of socialism. At that time, owning a little shop became a dream of my mother, Dumaa Jamba. She collected all we had to buy a little stand to sell her baked goods. This was my first experience with doing business. We had obtained a small profit after one year, enough to purchase a few sheep, goats and a small house outside of the city. My parents moved to that house to raise the animals, and this was when I really experienced how cashmere was produced and harvested. My mother would harvest soft and fury cashmere from goats to knit warm hats, scarves and gloves for my nieces and me. Just as my mother, I have had a passion for cashmere's unique quality ever since.

Mongolia produces one fourth of the world cashmere supply, and Mongolian cashmere is renowned as the best in quality. It is my country's third largest item of export, yet most of it has been exported in raw form without any value being added. When I heard of the School of Business' business plan competition while studying at BYUH, I wanted to write a plan that involved the cashmere industry of Mongolia. I had done some research on the many possibilities it could bring that would profit my country and contribute to its growing economy. With the help of one of my professors, Brian Carrington, I gave a small presentation at Hawaii's International Conference on Business in June, 2002. The topic was, “Growing Mongolian Economic Stability through Microenterprise and Entrepreneurship: A case study in cashmere industry”. According to my research in preparation for this presentation, the best way to solve the crisis in our industry was to export more finished cashmere goods to the United States and Europe.