Why this entrepreneur moved from Michigan to Maryland

It’s been 60 days since Tarsha Weary landed in Maryland. The Michigan native uprooted her business, SW Design School, for what she calls better opportunities, and to escape the drama that has plagued her hometown Detroit.
“In Detroit there is a lot of corruption going on,” Weary said. “So when you have an innovative idea it doesn’t matter because they don’t know who you’re connected with and people are leery about doing business, especially when the federal government is in there investigating everything.”
Her idea and company focuses on teaching students who don’t have the money for a traditional graphic design degree. She then helps place them into jobs. The training is online and mainly video tutorials but she picked Maryland as her new home because of grant funding that helps pay the salaries of her students.
The Maryland Job Driven National Emergency Grant will pick up almost the entire salary of an employee trained through Weary’s program.
“The grant is for dislocated workers that have been chronically unemployed,” she said. “Once they’ve been trained by a Maryland Higher Education Commission provider, like us, a company will receive 90 percent of their payroll for hiring our graduates.”
But since most companies don’t know about the grant and payroll break they could be receiving, Weary has been busy in the past two months trying to connect with potential employers for her students.
A company’s needs for well-trained employees is what got her into the business in the first place. Before starting SW Design School, Weary had her own graphic design firm and needed good employees.
“What ended up happening was we were hiring employees right out of college and they had the degree but they did not have the skillset,” she said. “So I created my own curriculum and pitched it to the state of Michigan and I got licensed as a proprietary school seven years ago.”
Since then she has been licensed in several other states but was attracted most to Maryland because of those grants and all of the potential students. She said there are plenty of schools and opportunities for students with high levels of education and financial resources, but that’s not who she’s trying to reach.
“We actually take adults with a sixth-grade education and that’s a high market here in Maryland,” Weary said. “We prepare them and get them ready for opportunities.”
And even though she’s only been here a short time, Weary is already creating a path to success for her students. She has developed a partnership with Anne Arundel Community College. Successful participants in her courses can then move to the community college and receive financial help if they qualify.
Weary will be holding an official grand opening for SW Design School later this month.