(WSB Radio)  The aha moment for Jim Norman came a few years back.

"My wife and I were shopping for school supplies for our five children," he says.  "It was very frustrating experience.  We were standing in an extremely long line at one of the discount department stores."

The shopping experience went on for hours, Norman says, and he was becoming more vocal as he waited in each store.

"I'm complaining about the experience," he says, "and the more I complained, the louder my voice got."

Finally, as he waited in his fourth department store, the life changing moment occurred.

"Suddenly a woman in front of us turned around and said, 'I'd pay someone to do this.'" 

OK.  It wasn't exactly, "Mr. Watson, come here.  I want you," but alexander Graham Bell probably never shopped for his kids school supplies. 

Out of that innocent comment, made by a fellow frustrated shopper, a new career was born.

"My wife and I went home, talked about it and said, would somebody really pay to do this?" Norman tells WSB.

Now, three years later, Norman is president of the School Supplies Network, based in Buford and growing fast.

"We provide pre-packaged school supplies for parents of, primarily, elementary and middle schools," says Norman, who was a nursing administrator before becoming an entrepreneur.  "Interestingly enough, we found it was a lot easier than we thought it would be."

The first thing was contacting suppliers, finding out how to buy in bulk.  So, after talks with Crayola, Dixon and Texas Instruments, Norman and his wife found their basement filled with pencils, crayons and glue. 

The next step was finding schools willing to work with their fledgling company.

"We tried to go to the schools," he says.  "We tried calling the schools, we tried knocking on the door at schools.  The principals didn't have time to talk to us."

But Norman found that all schools have business partners.  So, after writing a partnership check to the schools, he started getting calls from local administrators, asking what they could do for him.

He started working with school in the area of his Mill Creek home, signing up three elementary schools and one middle school.

That was 2007.  Two years later, School Supplies Network has grown to become a national business.

"We have schools as far away as Washington State," he says.  "Schools in Ohio, schools in Kentucky, Missouri."

The company offers parents the chance to avoid hours of shopping, making school supply shopping a one stop process.

"Parents will get a list from the schools of all the items they'll need for their child that's in third grade, say," Norman says, "then they'll go out to start shopping for it.  They'll find that, in order to get the supplies for their child in third grade and their child in fifth grade, they're going to be out in the shopping area for five or six hours.

"Whereas, they can come to us and either go online or fill out a form and the shopping experience is less than five minutes," he says.

In addition, the school gets 10% of the profits from the company.

Norman says School Supplies Networks is growing during the recession, as many parents who were stay-at-homes find themselves having to go back to work.  Norman also says, with money so tight, people can't afford to take time off from work to do the school shopping, or spend the gas needed to drive from store to store.

The company currently has four full-time employees and takes on a dozen or so more during its peak time.

Going national was not something Norman ever considered when he started School Supplies Network in 2006 and went into operation a year later.  His goal was simply to supply the local schools and maybe branch out to other districts in Georgia.

"We would have been satisfied with hosting only the Gwinnett County schools," he says.  "We would still be satisfied.  We would love to have every school in Gwinnett County.  That would wonderful.  That would be an incredible cottage industry."

In three years of business, Norman has gone from being an out of work nursing administrator to president of a company that's spreading to all parts of the United States.  It's all thanks to an innocent comment made by a stranger. 

Does Jim Norman ever think about that fellow frustrated shopper?

"We're real thankful to her for planting the seed," he says.  "Never saw her before and, to the best of my knowledge, never saw her again.  But, yeah, I think it was serendipitous .  We were just standing in line and got the comment and the light went on."

School Supplies Network