Times Conference Provides Firsthand Lessons in Seizing the Opportunity

If one lesson could be carried away from the Los Angeles Times Small Business Strategies Conference last weekend, it would be to seize opportunity.

Although the 56 sessions covered just about every conceivable business topic, from financing to time management to technology, one salient point emerged time and again: Successful entrepreneurs recognize and grab opportunities.

Not only did speakers emphasize this point in their talks, but the actions of individual business owners at the conference itself demonstrated this lesson. For small-business owners who attended, it was the unifying message--albeit unintentional, unadvertised and unspoken--behind the conference.

And it’s a lesson that many small-business owners, and even large corporations, have yet to understand and act on.

Some examples from the conference:

* Keynote speaker Patty DeDominic, chief executive of PDQ Personnel Services Inc. in Los Angeles, let the Saturday morning gathering in on a little secret: how she snagged a multimillion-dollar contract with the United Nations. It seems that DeDominic was one of thousands of women who gathered in Beijing in 1995 to participate in the U.N.-sponsored international conference on women, the first to ever include a segment on women and entrepreneurship.

Conference operations were in chaos, DeDominic said, and she saw that the event could use some temporary help, the very type of business she had built from the ground up. So, she offered workers. The event coordinator gratefully accepted and asked for four to report the next morning. DeDominic walked away exultant, she said, until she realized she was in China.

“I had no staff there, I had no idea about China’s labor laws and no idea about the value of the yuan,” she said. But with 6,500 women attendees, she figured she could persuade four to do the work for free. She succeeded and, months later, her small victory in China helped her successfully bid on and win a long-term contract with the United Nations.

* Ed Spiegel, owner of Spiegel Logistics Inc., a three-person company in La Mirada, took a booth in the Times conference exhibit hall. Nothing fancy. Just a sign, a table, two chairs and his business literature. He was skeptical that the conference would yield much business, he said, but thought he’d try it anyway.

Sure enough, the small companies at the conference didn’t have the big-money transport contracts he was looking for, but they had other needs: storage and smaller deliveries. The big distribution and warehouse companies wouldn’t bother to service them, the little guys complained to Spiegel, which made the tiny transport owner grin with delight.

With 15,000 square feet of warehouse space, he realized he could accommodate the small-fry whose inventories were overflowing their garages and home-based businesses. His handful of big-contract accounts gives him access to discounted prices on equipment rentals, temporary help and shipment orders, so he could throw the little guys into the mix and give them good rates, he said.

“They want me to store clothes, computers, books, food, magazines and I can do it,” he said. “There are thousands of people out there like me who can support these little companies.”

* Consultant Ray Considine, owner of Considine & Associates in Pasadena, was booked as a small business conference speaker and had a self-published book, “WAYMISH (Why Are You Making It So Hard for Me to Give You My Money?)” that he wanted sold there. But with no International Standard Book Number, the system used by the publishing industry to keep track of books, the event bookseller couldn’t order Considine’s books.

No matter.

“I’ll deliver them myself,” Considine said. And when the conference opened, there sat Considine’s books, stacked like a spiral staircase with one copy perched prominently on top.

* Sky Dayton, founder of EarthLink Network in Pasadena, told a rapt audience how, as a 9-year-old, he was given the chore of washing windows in the family apartment and decided to offer the service, for a fee, to other building tenants. His point: Seizing an opportunity has been a guiding principle all his life, including when he first logged on to the Internet in late 1993 as a coffeehouse owner.

“It was like opening a door to this valley of gold,” he said. “I realized I was looking at the next mass media.”

Not having a technology background didn’t stop Dayton from starting an Internet business. He got his first customer in July 1994, improvising the service as he went along. Now the company has 2,300 employees, $1.7-billion capitalization and annual revenue of $300 million, he said.

“We didn’t wait to have a perfect product; we sold what we had and were continually improving,” Dayton said. “Doing is what separates the entrepreneurs from the wannabes.”

And doing is where so many would-be entrepreneurs, and even large corporations, fail.

They are the folks who spend money to create attractive, sample packaging for their products but fail to research how products get placed on store shelves, how much it will cost them for shelf space and what kind of volume they’ll need to adequately stock their product.

They are the folks who yearn for media coverage of their struggling enterprise, thinking public attention will finally bring the surge in orders, success and money they need. Yet, they discover that more orders mean more expenditures of money they don’t even have.

And they are the large corporations that have done the math and see the potential in selling to small businesses. But they fail to adequately research the market to see what needs small-business owners have, how their products can be altered to meet those needs and, even, how their own corporation has to rethink its structure so that money can be made off the little guys. They need, like Ed Spiegel and his tiny company, to intimately know how the little guys work and how money can be made.

This doing is the second, crucial part of seizing opportunity. As DeDominic said: “You have to be able to deliver.”

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Times staff writer Vicki Torres can be reached at (213) 237-6553 or at vicki.torres@latimes.com.