The last thing newly married Danielle Rowlett expected to become at the DMV was an entrepreneur, but that’s where her thriving online business, MissNowMrs.com, was born.

Not quite 18 months since its launch, MissNowMrs.com has helped more than 13,540 brides living in every state change their names. Simply. Efficiently. Without hassle.

It started in 2005 when the 2003 McDaniel graduate took the day off from her very busy job in medical sales to change her name from Rowlett to Tate. She printed the forms from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) website and filled them out ahead of time. After nearly three hours in line, she was told she had the wrong forms.

She got back in line, this time with the correct forms, and filled them out while she waited. When her turn came around again a couple of hours later she was told she didn’t have the appropriate paperwork.

In all, Tate only became Tate as far as the DMV was concerned, after three trips to its doors.

“I was really fed up at this point,” she says. “I said to my husband, who’s been an entrepreneur for 13 years, that I didn’t understand why there wasn’t some sort of service to help brides change their names.”

His response? “Well, you should make one.”

To say the rest is history is to ignore the thought and learning and hard work that went into establishing the service. Every state has different forms and different procedures, and they change frequently. Tate researched meticulously. There was coding and programming.

And that’s where Tate says her McDaniel education gave her an edge.

“(At McDaniel) I learned that hard work, a book and the nerve to ask questions prepare you for almost anything,” she says, explaining that she’s used this formula to learn marketing, advertising, business and technology.

Now, she’s moving into branding, hoping to turn MissNowMrs.com into a generic trademark in the realm of Kleenex and Xerox.

“Everyone uses a cotton swab and calls it a Q-tip,” she says. “We’d like it to be MissNowMrs.com that everyone is talking about.”

She’s on her way with ad words on Yahoo and Google and banner ads on wedding web sites. Then, there’s word of mouth. And gift cards particularly for bridal showers – “It’s so much nicer than getting a cookbook.”

The service is $29.95, takes about a half-hour to complete the online form, and saves about 13 hours of time, Tate says. To her knowledge, there is no other online name-change service.

As soon as the service “saw black ink,” Tate adopted a corporate charity, Making Memories Breast Cancer Foundation, and began donating 5 percent of profits to the organization.

A biology major with a minor in psychology, Tate eventually left her job in selling cancer diagnostic equipment – a career she loved – to devote full time to the name-change service, a partnership with her husband, Culin, and one of his friends from college. Now she can’t imagine being anything but an entrepreneur.

“It’s so exciting. I had an original idea, made the idea work and now I’m watching it grow,” she says, adding that she has a couple more ideas she’s toying with. She won’t discuss any but one, a new website and name-change service she'll launch in late March – GetYourNameBack.com – for divorcees. This time, however, the idea isn’t coming from personal experience. Or frustration.

Visit MissNowMrs.com.