3 Business Women on Path to Success
Women are starting small businesses at twice the rate of men. If they maintain that pace, women will own nearly 40% of small businesses by the year 2000, according to the Small Business Administration.
“It’s a trend that’s going to continue for a number of reasons,” said Kris Morris, a partner with the executive search firm Cowen, Morris, Berger.
Morris and other observers attribute the growth to a contraction of middle management and expansion of the number of women entering the work force.
Female entrepreneurs are taking the spotlight in Los Angeles this week as the National Assn. of Women Business Owners holds a conference on business ownership through Sunday at the Century Plaza Hotel.
Here are profiles of three such women, who have taken widely different paths to success.
Patty DeDominic
Successful entrepreneurs often proclaim prosperity with a Malibu beach house, a yacht or a mountain cabin.
Patty DeDominic hired her former boss.
The owner of PDQ Personnel Services, a Los Angeles agency with six offices and projected revenue this year of $15 million, DeDominic considers having her former supervisor on the payroll among the most meaningful symbols of PDQ’s success--along with her Mercedes convertible and two staff MBAs.
The former boss, Ron Owens, is a PDQ vice president who introduced DeDominic to the temporary help business in 1972 when he hired her to work in an agency’s Sherman Oaks office.
She quit the agency in 1975 for a job with Avon Products Inc., eventually becoming a district manager.
“I had outgrown the businesses I had been working for,” said DeDominic, who quit Avon in 1979 and started PDQ with $2,000 and visions of escaping the frustrations of middle management. “I had a gnawing desire to be more free.”
Forfeiting regular paychecks--with a company car, expense account and first-class airline tickets--proved a rewarding sacrifice. Today, DeDominic manages a company with about 900 employees, including a full-time staff of 45. She oversees the business from a 5,000-square-foot office occupying half the fourth floor of the Mutual Benefit Life building on Wilshire Boulevard.
To survive the difficult times, DeDominic advises aspiring entrepreneurs to write a business plan, hone communication skills and turn to experts for help. “You don’t have to have all the answers to be successful. You just have to be aware you don’t have them and get them from experts,” she said.
Betty Robertson
As a Hughes Aircraft engineer, Betty Robertson admired the XIT Grounding System, a device Hughes installed to protect equipment from electrical disturbances such as lightning and power surges.
So when she learned in 1985 that XIT’s owners planned to sell out, she took out a $50,000 mortgage on her home, borrowed $100,000 from her brother-in-law and bought the company.
“It’s so simple and uncomplicated, but it does the job perfectly,” Robertson said.
Through the company she created, Lyncole XIT Grounding, Robertson sells the $550 system to customers wanting to protect people and expensive electronics such as telephone switches and radio transmitters.
The device is a perforated copper tube, two inches in diameter and 10 feet long, installed in the ground and filled with salt that reacts with water to create a solution that conducts electricity. The liquid seeps down the tube, forming an electrical path through which surges can dissipate into the earth. Lyncole bills the system as more stable and reliable than the conventional driven rod.
Since she quit her job at Hughes to start the company, Robertson has nurtured the company from $150,000 in sales in 1986 to $1.2 million last year. With 15 employees making the devices in an 8,000-square-foot plant in Torrance, Lyncole hopes to reach $1.8 million this year and $10 million within five years.
She admits the growth of XIT was rocky, forcing her to develop management skills she never polished as an engineer.
Her advice to would-be entrepreneurs: “You have to plan on working twice as hard as you can imagine possible, then work some more.”
Nancy Peterson
Nancy Peterson’s training for running a tool company with 90 employees and national sales included washing, ironing and carting six children to football and swimming practices.
When her husband, John, died of cancer in 1979, she was thrust into his duties as chief executive of Nashville, Tenn.-based Peterson Tool Co., a maker of tools used in machines that shape metal. She found herself applying the skills she learned raising a family to running a growing company.
“When you managed a household for eight, there was a budget to balance and people to deal with constantly. There were teachers and doctors,” she said. “I was really continuing on. Only my budget became larger.”
Although the move into the chief executive’s office was a stark change, she had begun working at the company five years earlier, starting as a fill-in for a secretary on maternity leave and moving up from there.
The mainstay of Peterson’s business are its ThriftEdge tools, which have replaceable blades. John, who started the company in 1958 in the back of a barn, developed ThriftEdge, but Nancy polished the design and patented it.
When her husband learned of his illness just months before his death, he told her she was going to take over the business.
“He was so confident that I could do it that I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know I couldn’t,” she said.
Peterson jumped into her new position, returning to work a week after John died.
“I was standing at the funeral, and I looked over at all the employees and I thought, ‘Oh, God.’ That’s when I felt the heavy responsibility and couldn’t show I was weak,” she said. “I didn’t have time to feel sorry for me. These employees and their families were relying on me. There were a lot of mouths to feed. Everybody was looking to me.”
Since she took over Peterson, revenue has quadrupled, she said. Employment has also tripled, and the company has moved to a building three times the original’s size.
