Health is her business - Janis J. Hahn owns Radiology Relief temporary personnel service - Company Profile

Nation's Business, March, 1993 by Sharon Nelton

From the time she was 12 years old, Janis L. Hahn knew she wanted a career in radiology. And a life-or-death battle with cancer that began five years later--accompanied by operations, chemotherapy, and radiation--did not deter her.

Today, Hahn, who is 39, owns Radiology Relief, Inc., a temporary-personnel service in San Diego that provides radiology technologists to hospitals and medical centers.

Hahn's story begins in her hometown of Trumbull, Conn., where, as an adolescent, she served as a volunteer at a convalescent home run by Carmelite nuns. "I was assigned to a sister who ran the radiology department," Hahn recalls. That set her course.

At 17, Hahn developed ovarian cancer With home tutoring, she finished high school. But after graduation, her illness made it impossible for her to start radiology school at either of the two institutions that had accepted her--a nearby hospital and the Yale School of Radiography. The following year, officials at the local school said they thought Hahn was still too sick to attend and suggested she become a medical secretary instead.

"Nobody's going to tell me no," she told herself. She called Yale to see if they still wanted her. They did, and she completed the two-year program in 1974.

On her first job, at a hospital in New Rochelle, N.Y., Hahn worked the night shift. She started receiving calls from technologists who worked days asking her to cover for them when they took time off. She nearly doubled her income. "It's what planted the seed," she says.

She went to work for two doctors and began to think seriously about moving to California--a desire she'd had since she visited the state several years earlier. One of her bosses had a particularly bad. temper. "Every time he yelled at me, I sat ' down and wrote out a check for $50," she says. Each check was deposited in a savings account in California. By the time she was ready to go, she had $2,000 waiting for her.

Hahn settled in San Diego in 1979 and took a job in a clinic, but the work was so routine that she quit and began free-lancing again. Before long, the available work outstripped her available time, and she began hiring other technologists to help out.

Radiology Relief now bills around $1 million annually (down from prerecession highs of $1.3 million to $1.5 million a year) and employs 35 full-time and part-time people.

When Hahn was named winner of a "Women of Enterprise" award by Avon Products and the U.S. Small Business Administration in 1990, she was so inspired by the stories of her co-winners--entrepreneurs who had overcome such problems as alcoholism and marital abuse--that she decided she had to do something more. "I only had cancer," she jokes.

She started Specialized Imaging of Rancho Bernardo, a center that provides ultrasound and mammography services at lower cost. It has been a real gamble. She has yet to make a profit. But she says her aim with the younger business is not to make big money but to educate women and encourage them, especially those on lower incomes, to get mammograms.

Hahn hasn't been stopped yet. And she can laugh at the headline on a story that a national tabloid once wrote about her. It said: "Dying Girl Starts Million-Dollar Business." She has survived cancer for 22 years.