Capitalizing on market needs at the right time

Lisa Yuan (MBA ’09) is the epitome of resilience. When she graduated from the Full-Time MBA Program at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School at the height of the Great Recession, she wondered if she would ever get a job — if she would be able to stay in the U.S.

Returning home to China seemed inevitable before she tapped into UNC Kenan-Flagler’s network to explore new opportunities. “I told them I wanted to keep learning practical skills, even if I ultimately had to go back to China at the time,” she says.

Leaders at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise referred her to local firms that worked globally, and she joined a small business. She stayed there for a few years “gaining hands-on experience and building my network,” she says. “I’m very grateful to the UNC community for their support during that difficult period.”

Yuan went on to build a career that took her from that small North Carolina business to working on the global supply chains of Cree, the silicon carbide chip leader and a pioneer in premium-grade LED components and lighting products.

“At Cree, I saw the whole chain of how a product goes from concept to shelf — finding a factory, working with engineers from samples to testing, demand planning, bringing products into the U.S., and all the way to the people buying them,” says Yuan.

She advanced quickly and moved into supply chain management — later overseeing the purchasing of the entire lighting business by another company.

Working closely with top leadership at Cree gave her insights into how leaders think and make decisions, she says. “It was an incredibly rewarding and formative experience, and it gave me a full-system view of supply chains and product commercialization.”

Yuan’s next career step was to become an entrepreneur: She launched two businesses, BlueAcorn and Solara Power.

Ready, set, launch

Yuan has a sixth sense for capitalizing on market needs at the right time, and she says her UNC Kenan-Flagler education set her up for success in a new career direction.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many Amazon sellers scaled faster than they could have ever imagined. They became overwhelmed with orders because people weren’t shopping in brick-and-mortar stores — they were buying online.

Online sellers needed help and they needed it fast. Yuan and her husband stepped in and BlueAcorn was born. It began as a service business providing repacking and related work, such as logistics and operations, for Amazon’s top sellers, with she and her husband packing and shipping products from their garage.

“In a large organization, volume plays a bigger role,” she says. “In a startup, you must know how to pack a sample, tape up the box and drop it at FedEx because you’re running the supply chain. There’s nobody else. You’re the only one.”

Then she saw another opportunity and pivoted the focus for the firm.

Yuan runs a family business, including support from her son.

“Over time, those brands realized that Amazon was getting very crowded. That pushed them to expand their channels beyond e-commerce,” says Yuan. “Because of my background and our capabilities here in the U.S., they asked us if we could help distribute their products to major retailers. We decided to give it a try and started working with retailers like Home Depot and then we expanded to BestBuy, Target, Chewy and others. The business evolved from a service provider into a distributor and reseller for top-selling brands.”

Today BlueAcorn distributes nearly 300 SKUs in seven major product categories, all from top sellers on Amazon to major U.S. retailers.

In the first year, the company’s revenue was about $300,000 to $400,000. It grew incrementally and now it is approved to launch in 1,500-plus Target stores nationwide. She is budgeting for more than $7 million in revenue for 2026.

Startup life is “not always a happy, smooth ride,” says Yuan who experienced funding pressures with high growth, a need to continuously improve her multi-task and communication skills, and simultaneously growing her businesses, more structured team and her two children.

“Running a startup consumes so much of your time and emotional energy,” she says. “It’s been a very exciting journey, definitely with ups and downs, but, overall, it has been successful.”

“I also attribute this to very committed, hard-working funding team members who joined very early on. Their global sales, supply chain and strategic planning experiences and skills formed the core of our early success.”

Full of energy for the future

In 2025, Yuan launched a second venture, Solara Power. The renewable energy company offers battery-energy storage systems for residential, commercial and industrial usage. They work with installers and wholesale partners in North Carolina to support the increasing energy demand driven by artificial intelligence and data centers.

Yuan’s motivation to launch a second venture was her focus on the future and again meet a market need. One of the first Amazon businesses that she helped was selling electric vehicle (EV) chargers. Her team placed them in Home Depot, but they did not perform well. The EV market in the U.S. is only now catching up to those in Europe and Asia, and Tesla has its own strong ecosystem, says Yuan. The chargers were meant for everyone but Tesla owners.

“We met with the factories to broaden our product portfolio, and that’s when I realized that many factories were already manufacturing renewable energy products — things like solar-related systems and large battery units. That was the real opportunity behind the EV chargers.”

Different from the consumer electronics that BlueAcorn distributes, Solara Power offers long-life, high-ticket products that require technical support, warranties, regulatory and compliance work, and close collaboration with installers, wholesalers and utilities. It offers what looks like a Tesla Powerwall system.

At Yuan’s home, a team is installing solar panels on the roof and a large battery system and an inverter that will take the electricity from the panels, convert and store it in the battery to provide backup power for the whole house.

“What I really like is that renewable energy is about the future — and it’s going to be important for a very long time,” she says.  “As the businesses grow and we become stronger, I want us to be able to do more good for the community. Strength means influence, and influence means responsibility.”

The power of her MBA

She credits UNC Kenan-Flagler with giving her the tools necessary for having long-term success, leading a strong team and navigating whatever comes along. She says the diverse study groups proved the importance of building a team of people with different strengths and backgrounds.

“As I run a startup with just a few employees, that experience is invaluable today. It’s not enough to be individually strong,” says Yuan. “You need to create synergy, something that’s greater than 1+1+1. That’s exactly what we do today, and my MBA experience shaped my ability to build and lead that kind of team.”

Her MBA studies gave her a safe space for practicing the problem-solving skills needed to use in her career, a common language to work across functions, a leadership system to guide her and an ability to absorb new information and fit it into that system. She describes her UNC Kenan-Flagler education as an operating system.

“Before business school, most of us are performing at high levels in specific functions, maybe engineering, finance or marketing. But we saw things through that narrow lens,” Yuan says. “At UNC Kenan-Flagler, you don’t learn each functional area in isolation — you learn how to integrate them into a cohesive system.

“You don’t always use every part of that system right away. Sometimes, you only realize years later, in a new situation, that you can draw on that framework. It shapes how you think, how you see people’s behavior, and how you operate under pressure. So, in many ways, my UNC Kenan-Flagler education didn’t just give me knowledge in finance, marketing and operations. It helped rebuild me as a person.”