Making the World a Better Place

Turtle Wings is born. Let me give you the lowdown.

As senior vice president of international marketing for CitiFinancial, Elizabeth Wilmot (pictured) had traveled the world and had seen some of the huge used-electronics dumps that have been created in nations such as India. She also had experienced the difficulty of trying to recycle a computer herself. "I thought to myself, 'I would pay somebody to pick this up and recycle it and scrub my data off of it,' " she recalls. Thus the idea for her company, Turtle Wings, was born.

Back then, Elizabeth was a single mom, quit her job and used savings and home equity to start the business in 2004. The company, once run out of her kitchen, now occupies two warehouses and 12 employees serving households, corporations and government agencies.

Read more about Elizabeth's successful leap from Corporate America to business ownership here.