BUSINESS PULSE : SMALL BUSINESS IN ORANGE COUNTY : SMALL BUSINESSES, BIG DREAMS : Great Sailsmanship Allows Couple to Work <i> and </i> Play

If they ran a jealousy sweepstakes among small-business owners, Randy and Terri Smyth would be likely candidates to win in the “people to envy” category.

Their business not only enables them to support their avocation--it is a big part of it.

The company, Sails by Smyth, is a small Huntington Beach firm specializing in custom sails for catamarans.

The avocation is catamaran racing.

Terri Smyth said she and her husband spend about 6 months of each year at home in Huntington Beach, tending to the business of sail making and marketing. The other 6 months is spent in their research-and-development lab: a succession of racing catamarans that Randy skippers in professional sailing events.

“It’s out there on the water that Randy tests and designs sails and comes up with the ideas that keep the business successful,” Terri said.

Randy Smyth began the business in 1976 after spending several years working for a sail maker in Hawaii.

He came back to his native Southern California because he wanted to prepare for a tryout on the 1980 Olympics sailing squad.

“He started making sails because he liked doing it and had learned a lot about it in Hawaii, “ Terri said. “And he figured he might as well do something he liked to make money to support the sailing.”

Smyth didn’t get a chance to compete in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow because of the U.S. boycott of the event. But in 1984, in his home waters off Los Angeles, he won a silver medal in the Tornado Class for 20-foot catamarans.

The clout of having an Olympic medalist at the helm of the company brought in a new wave of business. And Randy saw in the medal an opportunity to market himself as a winning skipper on the growing professional sailing circuit.

Now the Smyths--he’s 36, she’s 32--run a second business out of the sail loft: marketing Randy’s skills as a competition catamaran skipper. Boat owners and sponsors retain the Smyths to put together crews and handle the logistics and public relations of campaigning their boats, either in individual races or for an entire season.

Being away from the sail loft for half the year hasn’t proven to be a problem, Terri said, “because we have really excellent people in charge at home and because with technology today, you can do business away from home, thanks to Federal Express and fax machines and computers and cellular telephones.”

Sails by Smyth employs eight people and has annual sales of about $500,000. The Smyths don’t intend to get a whole lot bigger, Terri said, because they serve a highly specialized market and because they simply want to stay small. Having 50 or 100 employees, she said, would get in the way of the other part of the business--the sailing.

But lest the Smyths’ story sound like one with never a squall on the horizon, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

Two years ago, for instance, a group of employees decided they could do the job as well as the boss and left en masse to start a competing sail loft.

“That was a drastic event,” Terri said. “We had to replace most of our crew all at once. I blame it on not being real skilled in human resources management, although we’ve learned since then.”

Terri gives Orange County high marks as a place for a small business because of “the fantastic business support system here. If you need to ship something, there are 79 freight forwarders in the phone book. Everything you need is close by.”

But the county gets low marks from the Smyths for the way real estate and labor costs have soared and the way traffic congestion--both in and out of the water--has worsened in the past decade.

For those reasons, Sails by Smyth is about to move across the country, to Ft. Walton Beach, Fla., where “for what we pay for rent on the loft in Huntington Beach, we can buy our own land and build our own building,” Terri said. And Randy can continue his habit of roller skating to work without fear of being run over, she added.

“Every one of our employees is moving with us to Florida, with bells on,” she said. “They are talking about buying houses and having extra money at the end of the month. It is all economics.”