Ten years ago, when BLACK ENTERPRISE unveiled its annual list of the nation’s top, black industrial/service companies, the number of women-led businesses could be counted on one hand. Fast-forward to 2003 and the numbers look a bit different. Not only are there more women-owned companies on the list (eight) than in previous year, but they are also steadily climbing toward the top spot on the private equity and advertising agencies lists. Of the women-owned companies on this year’s industrial/service list, three are in the top 10, and industry analysts say women-run companies are now the fastest-growing segment in entrepreneurship. Meet a few of these powerful women CEOs.
POSITIVE REORGANIZATION
The screen saver on Jeanette Abraham’s computer reads: Because I can. Maybe that explains the success of the 50-year-old CEO’s company, Detroit Heading L.L.C., which supplies fasteners, such as bolts and screws, to the automotive industry (No. 86 on the BE INDUSTRIAL/ SERVICE 100 list). “Who’s going to tell me I can’t?” she asks.
Abraham (pictured at left) brought her can-do attitude to Detroit Heading, which is partly owned by Textron Fastening Systems, in 2000 when she purchased a 51% ownership stake in the company. She quickly put her stamp on the company. “It was very difficult because the previous owner had passed away,” she says. “They were familiar with him. He was one of them. He was laid-back and wanted to get along with everyone. For me to come in not necessarily trying fit in, well, people tried me.”
One of the first things she discovered when she took over was that the company had little structure. “The atmosphere was pretty laid-back and there wasn’t much accountability for people. Policies and processes were not in place so people didn’t know what was expected of them,” she explains. So Abraham revamped her staff. “One of the first things I put in place was an effective, strong executive management team. I hired a vice president of human resources, both new positions, as well as an outside sales team. With this newly structured management team, we created policies and procedures allowing for defined performance expectations from our next level of managers,” she says. The changes worked and the company has been experiencing steady growth since she took the helm.
In 2000, the year Abraham took over, the company brought in $30 million in revenue. In 2002, Detroit Heading brought in more than $35 million in revenue, and Abraham says the company is on track to reach the $38 million mark by the end of 2003. Textron spokesman Tim Weir says Abraham and Detroit Heading are a major part of Textron’s success.
But while business was booming, not all of Abraham’s employees were happy with her changes. “People were accustomed to doing things a certain way,” she says. Even now, nearly three years later, she still occasionally encounters resistance from employees. But on the flip side, she says, “Employees have a better understanding of what is expected of them.”
But Abraham doesn’t always wear a hard hat. She sends a birthday card to each of her 86 employees, and if she’s in the office, she hand delivers it herself. “People need to know that they can count on you,” she says.
Before she ever stepped foot into the offices of Detroit Heading, Abraham was already a major force in the fastener business. As purchasing manager of worldwide fasteners for North American operations at GM, it was she who decided which companies would get GM’s business. Now she is charged with convincing companies like GM to buy her fasteners. “At GM, I knew the CEOs of companies that are my competitors today.”
Despite the seeming ease of her successes, Abraham is quick to admit that racism and sexism do exist, particularly in a male-dominated field such as her own. “It’s challenging because I’m a minority and a woman. It’s a double whammy,” she says. Her 32 years of experience with GM “doesn’t stop some people from wondering, ‘How did you arrive from where you were to where you are?’ She says that men, in particular, have seemed less willing to acknowledge her many accomplishments. But she just shrugs it off. “I don’t need accolades to drive me.” Abraham is heartened by the strides black women have made in business, and hopes her can-do attitude will spill over to other women. “I encourage women,” she says. “I want to be a living example of the fact that they can do things too.”
PREPARED TO SUCCEED
At 35, Gwendolyn Smith Iloani was on top of the world. She was a managing director for Aetna Inc., where she had invested more than $4 billion and where she oversaw a $9.2 billion portfolio throughout her career there. She had a six-figure salary and the respect of her peers. So what did she do? She walked away from it all in 1994 and founded her own investment firm, Hartford, Connecticut-based Smith Whiley & Co. (No. 4 on the BE PRIVATE EQUITY list), which was initially formed as a strategic alliance with Aetna. Now, at 46, Iloani is on top of the world again.
“When you decide you want to be an entrepreneur you have to ask yourself, ‘Do I really need this money?'” she says, referring to a 9-to-5 salary. “You must do troubleshooting and reconcile within yourself what you want to do.” Iloani says she did a lot of soul searching, “I was a single woman at the time with no husband to turn to if it didn’t work.” But she quelled her fears or at least postponed them, “I told myself if it didn’t work, I would find something else to do.”
Iloani didn’t leave her company’s growth to chance. “It took about a year between the time I started thinking about the business and [the time I was] actually doing it,” she says. “I wanted to be sure I had enough capital to survive for three years if the company didn’t attract any customers. I wanted to make sure the people on my team wouldn’t have to get second or third jobs to support their families.” Starting out with five employees, Iloani figured she’d need $2.5 million initially. Aetna, her former employer, invested that amount in Smith Whiley. “They believed in my vision,” she says. Two years later she bought Aetna out. While the amount she paid is confidential, she assures, “Aetna was pleased with their investment.” Last year, Smith Whiley & Co. closed the books with $213 million under management, a success that guarantees steady paychecks not just for Iloani but for her 14 employees as well.
Iloani believes her business survived the early days of soliciting clients because she had a good business strategy, attractive profit potential, and had raised enough money to carry her through any lean times. “Most companies fail because they have no capital and no plan,” she says. “[It takes time to] flush out the inconsistencies, to make sure you have the proper procedures in place.”
Being a woman in the male-dominated investment industry is a mixed bag. “We deal with inst
itutional clients and portfolio clients,” Iloani says. “The portfolio clients generally aren’t taken aback [by my being female] because they want money. But as we attempt to secure new investing clients, the marketing cycle is long — particularly in this economic climate — and it continues to be an old boys network.”But Iloani learned early that the best way to ease clients’ minds was to establish credibility by subtly mentioning her past achievements. In a casual conversation “I might say I was the first black female hired on the investment side of Aetna, mention my investment track record, or that Aetna invested $2.5 million in my company. That’s like, ‘Wow. ‘ People respect money. They have to admire that I didn’t start out with nothing,” she says.
Smith Whiley specializes in making private equity investments in small and medium-sized
companies in five industry sectors. The company also invests in companies that haven’t had much access to growth capital, including domestic emerging companies in urban areas and inner cities. In 1999, when Smith Whiley launched a fund that would raise money from the private sector to invest in companies in urban markets, then President Bill Clinton publicly lauded the company’s success with finding investment opportunities in new markets.
In the midst of her business success, Iloani gained custody of her three nephews after her sister died of leukemia. “I was a workaholic before. Now I’m cured,” she laughs. “I used to work from 7:00 a.m. to midnight. Now I work until around eight or nine at night. It’s hard to work when the kids want quality time. I spend my weekends with the kids. I purposely do not have a cell phone so that I can take the time to have fun with them.” She adds that going from being responsible for no children to being responsible for three made her a more effective CEO, “Now I don’t sweat the small stuff.” Iloani’s expanded family fulfilled her life but she admits that the sudden addition of three children wasn’t easy. Her solution: “I manage with the help of my mom, my sister, nannies — I need proper support since I travel about 30% of the time,” she says.
Iloani wants to continue to grow her business. She also is optimistic that more black women will try entrepreneurship: “With all this education and wonderful work experience behind black women, they’ll naturally look for their own opportunities as they rise within the corporate world.”
A CREATIVE OUTLOOK
Carol H. Williams, CEO, president, and chief creative officer of the advertising agency that bears her name, has never given much thought to failure. “Failure is a decision you make,” she says. “You may make a mistake, you may make an error, but as long as you have the courage to learn, change, grow, and keep moving forward, you can never fail.”
The success of Carol H. Williams Advertising (No. 4 on the BE ADVERTISING AGENCIES list and the 1999 BE Advertising Agency of the Year), her Oakland-based advertising empire, bears that truth. With $130 million in billings in 2002, more than twice the $48.5 million in billings it made five years earlier, the agency has wooed and won clients such as General Motors, Coors Brewing Co., Allstate, and Bank of America since it opened its doors in 1986.
Williams credits her success to her creativity, strategic knowledge, and an overwhelming passion for what she does. After a fulfilling advertising career with Leo Burnett’s ad agency in Chicago and Foote Cone & Belding ad agency in San Francisco, Williams left the industry in 1982 to start a family, with no intention of launching a business. But just when she thought she had left the business, “Different clients that I had worked with approached me about doing some general market and African American-targeted work,” she says. “As I got into it, it began to rekindle my passion for advertising and its strategic challenges. I always considered myself a problem solver.”
The load of freelance clients continued to grow until she needed help with all the work. “I’d gone from myself to several people to several, several people,” she laughs. “Then one day, my husband said, ‘I think you need to stop playing at this thing and recognize that you have a real business here.'” Once Williams made the decision to turn her part-time passion into a full-time job in 1986, she ran into some obstacles: Some firms struggle with the idea of a creative black woman handling their advertising business. “They simply couldn’t realize that creativity, strategic knowledge, and managerial skills could be housed in a black, female body.” About the companies that thought Williams’ gender impeded her creativity, she simply says, “They missed out on a rewarding relationship.” But she admits that in the early days of her career, people’s prejudices were “troublesome because you feel you’re not recognized for your brilliance. I literally have had men suggest to me that achieving my level of success was due to feminine wiles,” she says. How did she react to such slights? She ignored them. People’s hang-ups are like growing pains, she says. “Then you realize, ‘I don’t have to own this pain.'”
As the agency built its name around ad campaigns targeting African Americans, a challenge for Williams was convincing new clients not to pigeonhole the agency, believing it only wielded influence in the black community. “What I’m an expert in is advertising,” she says. “To try to diminish what we do, suggesting that we only target African Americans, is failing to recognize the huge impact and influence the African American consumer has on other markets and market trends.”
“The strength of the agency comes from Carol’s background,” says Christopher Robinson, director of African American and youth marketing for General Motors. “Carol has been in advertising for over 30 years. They’ve gotten a lot of respect within the organization [GM] and their scope just keeps expanding.” Williams’ career accomplishments speak to the fact that her expertise is not limited by race. Among her most widely touted achievements in the advertising industry: She was the brain behind Secret deodorant’s “Strong Enough for a Man, but Made for a Woman” campaign while at Leo Burnett, where she worked from 1969 until 1980.
Today, Williams says her biggest challenge is monitoring changes in the business world and preparing her staff to take a greater role in her agency’s growth. She says she wants to ensure that what she’s laid out “has vision, energy, inspires continual growth, and achieves superiority.”
Now in her 50s, the best advice Williams has for budding entrepreneurs is to “be wonderfully creative, strategically smart, and never, never quit. And always be prepared for the unexpected, because it’s not the unexpected that determines winners, it’s how you manage the unexpected. Know that nothing will go right at first, but the one thing you absolutely need to go right will.”
No matter how storied Williams’ life is, she doesn’t care to dwell too long on the past knowing that the future has wonderful things in store. The way she sees it, “Life is staircase, keep moving upward.”
MAKING OPPORTUNITIES
As the first black person to integrate her high school in Tarboro, North Carolina, Janice Bryant Howroyd learned at an early age the pains associated with an unsupportive environment. “On the first day of class, I listened to my teacher explain why Africans were so well suited to slavery and how we’d be much poorer as a society if we went any further with this affirmative action,” she recalls. “I cried and pleaded with my parents that night
But the experience was a defining moment for Howroyd, 50, and it inspires her daily to help temporary and permanent workers find the most supportive working environments through her multimillion dollar employment services empire. Since its inception in 1978, the Torrance, California-based ACTo1 Group (No. 3 on the BE INDUSTRIAL/SERVICE 100 list) has grown from a single office with a desk and phone to 90 offices across the country. In 2002, ACTo1 brought in $483 million in revenue. The company has multiple divisions that provide services such as recruitment, employment placement, and training to such corporate clients such as Ford Motor Co., Sempra Energy, and the Gap.
Howroyd dreamed up the idea of starting her own firm while temping for her brother-in-law at Billboard magazine, where she discovered she had a knack for s
olving office problems. “[The Billboard staff] never wanted me to go,” she says. “They were amazed that I knew what needed to happen in an office.” Howroyd also learned something else about herself while working at Billboard. “I realized that I enjoyed … helping people get temporary and permanent jobs. When someone told me to hang out my own shingle, I took the chance.”
Armed with $967 in personal savings and $533 in loans from her mother and brother, Howroyd leased a small office and then got on the phone to drum up business. She called one company after another in order to introduce herself to area employers and even offered to return their money if they used ACTo1’s services and an employee didn’t work out. With such high stakes, she had to know that the person she was sending to a particular company was the right person for the job. The only way she could make sure of was to get to know applicants personally, a task that her company was better able to do than bigger, slow-footed rivals.
But for Howroyd, finding the perfect match between employer and employee was not just about pleasing clients and making money. From her experiences in high school and at Billboard, Howroyd knew that people would perform better in working environments that capitalized on their personal strengths. Her philosophy: Never compromise who you are personally for who you wish to be professionally. “This value became rooted deep inside me from my childhood, seeing working people whose work did not afford them dignity,” she says. “It is a core value of how I do business today. I believe in empowering people.”
While it’s impossible for Howroyd to know all 60,000 job candidates that the company works with today, she insists that her 290 full-time employees use the same personal networking skills to land employees in the right jobs that helped her net her first clients. She also places an emphasis on community involvement. In 2001, the Georgia Minority Supplier Development Council named ACTo1 Supplier of the Year, not only because of the company’s success with placing employees in jobs but because of its involvement with Atlanta-area business and community organizations.
While ACTo1 is no longer a small business, she stresses the “human” in human resources by creating an atmosphere more like those at smaller companies: “ACTo1 is still the ‘great big little company’ serving two clients — the company and the employee we’re placing with the company.”
Women CEOs of the B.E. 100S INDUSTRIAL/SERVICE List
| Â | No. | Name | Company | Started Year |
Type of Business | Sales* |
| 2003 | 3 | Janice Bryant Howroyd | Act One Personnel Services | 1978 | Staffing and professional services | 487.530 |
| Â | 5 | Linda Johnson Rice | Johnson Publishing Co. Inc. | 1942 | Publishing, TV production, cosmetics, and haircare | 424.744 |
| Â | 9 | Oprah Winfrey | Harpo Inc. | 1986 | TV and film production, magazine publishing, and motivational conferences | 314.500 |
| Â | 38 | Valerie Daniels-Carter | V&J Holding Cos. Inc. | 1984 | Burger King and Pizza Hut franchisee | 95.000 |
| Â | 48 | Robin C. Brooks | Brooks Food Group Inc. | 1995 | Manufacturer and marketer of custom food products to national restaurants | 71.745 |
| Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â |
| Â | 53 | Angela M. Mason | ITS Services Inc. | 1991 | Information technology and telecommunications support services | 67.048 |
| Â | 76 | Victoria Lowe | Alert Staffing | 1995 | Staffing service, specializing in customized staffing solutions | 43.351 |
| Â | 86 | Jeanette M. Abraham | Detroit Holding L.L.C. | 1988 | Manufacturer of automotive fasteners and bolts | 35.641 |
| * IN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO THE NEAREST THOUSAND | ||||||
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