She's no Lou: Tri-County Transportation CEO Lorraine Celestino has had to be plenty tough to run the company she owns with Broward taxi king Jesse Gaddis. But she brings a woman's touch to the business - Transportation

South Florida CEO, May, 2003 by Jeff Zbar

Lorraine Celestino Wilde admits she's no typical cabbie.

She wasn't when she was a 27-year-old nursing student and single mom driving a taxi for Yellow Cab of Hollywood by day, so she could watch her three kids at night.

Nor was she later, in 1975, when she managed 140 cabs in a dicey part of Philadelphia. "It was a precarious situation," admits Celestino, who returned two years later to Hollywood to manage the local Yellow Cab company operations.

Celestino again bucked tradition in 1985 when she took a second mortgage on her home to drop $45,000 on three cab permits from boss and Broward cab king-pin Jesse Gaddis to start her own cab company. With All Broward Services Inc., Celestino became the first woman cab owner in Broward County.

A year later, she answered a request for proposal from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport for a limousine contract. She partnered with Gaddis to create Yellow Airport Limousine Service and won the contract. Today, 18 years later, Celestino still holds a 25 percent stake in -- and is president and CEO of -- TriCounty Transportation/Airport Express, an airport-based limousine company. The firm has 90 sedans and 30 vans, and gross revenues of $9 million a year.

Though admittedly a strong-willed manager, Celestino, 57, can be as soft-spoken as the grandmother of eight that she is. Don't think Danny DeVito's abrasive Lou from the sitcom "Taxi." Celestino brings a woman's touch to the trade.

The public face of the business is run curbside at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International, but operations -- dispatching, billing, finance -- are handled from a nondescript building on West Oakland Park Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. From this office, Celestino has changed the business. She was the first in Broward to introduce plush Lincoln Town Cars (as opposed to multi-passenger vans) and well-dressed drivers to the local limo business. She also backed the county's Sunsational Service training program, requiring the four-hour classes for her own drivers.

"She's made a huge difference in the face of the taxi industry and the county," says Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau, who has known Celestino for two decades.

"She is a good, strong executive," says Gaddis, who in 1995 also named Celestino vice president and COO of Gaddis' Gray Line charter bus service, which he sold in 1997. "She's very tough-minded when it comes to making executive decisions. She doesn't waffle."

Enter her office lobby, however, and Celestino's softer side becomes clear. Some 20 hand-written thank-you cards line the walls, testament to the Wednesdays Celestino spends reading books (that she buys herself) to a third-grade class at Lloyd Estates Elementary, an under-privileged school near the office. Last year, Celestino and her employees donated $500 for supplies. During Christmas, a driver dresses up as Santa Claus. For Valentine's Day, they exchange cards with the kids.

The company also does an annual toy drive for Kids in Distress, and sponsors kids for local camps. The drivers -- who can clear $40,000 a year after paying $675 a week to Tri-County for car use, insurance and maintenance -- aren't forced to participate, but few decline Celestino's invite. "The drivers sometimes fight it, but in their hearts I think they appreciate it' says Celestino, whose office is filled with pictures of her older children, plus 14-year-old son James Jr., whom she drives to Pine Crest School from their home in Weston each day. Her husband, James Wilde, is the company's airport manager. "Most of my drivers are family people," she says.

In the future, Celestino would like to see more women in the business. She has but two female drivers, she notes longingly, but is grooming her admin -- a go-getter not unlike Celestino herself a few decades back -- for a bigger role. With 30 years in the business, Celestino regrettably observes that some jobs are cast by gender. She thinks back to her teen years, when he father rebuffed talk of her following him into the New York garment trade as a pleater.

"'This is not a woman's business,"' she recalls him saying. "It always kind of stuck in my head. Why is something a woman's business and something a man's business?"