Vincent Forgione has built an impressive entrepreneurial resume.

The Woodbridge resident’s exploits have included running a major textile company, owning restaurants and a nightclub in Boca Raton, Fla., brokering deals for Middlesex County’s highest-volume real estate agency, building a successful business consultancy and co-founding a home theater installation firm.

But when asked about the tools of his trade, the former English teacher is likely to mention a device of the garden variety. “So much depends on a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain water, beside the white chicken,” Forgione said, quoting the poet and fellow New Jerseyan William Carlos Williams.

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Tracey Amadi and Janice Francisco turned a unique body scrub into a profitable business. Photo by Brendan McInerney

Janice Francisco is an accountant by trade, but her passion is skin care.

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Some hail kombucha tea, an ancient drink that combines, sugar, tealeaves, and a special blend of yeast and bacteria, as a glorious elixir that strengthens immune systems and wards off cancer.

Others, including respected voices in the medical community, regard it as a potentially harmful concoction whose purported heath benefits are overstated if not illusory.

At right, Patras and her daughter Ciara

Ruth Patras suspects the drink saved her daughter Ciara’s liver and possibly her life. Patras’s company, the eponymous Toms River-based Ciara’s Kombucha, sells to dozens of supermarkets the same drink Patras said her daughter has consumed every day since she was nine weeks old.

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Entrepreneur University graduate Joelle Lynn once thought her job at the large mortgage-lending firm for which she works was secure.

When the housing bubble burst a few years ago, though, the ensuing waves of layoffs within Lynn’s company made her anxious. She decided to cut her hours and indulge her latent passion for entrepreneurship by founding Beautiful Waxing Boutique, a Plainsboro, N.J. waxing salon that opened this month.

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