Out on a limb and on their own - two businesswomen become entrepreneurs

Nation's Business, March, 1994 by John S. DeMott

Marcie Bannon and Andrea Olsen live on opposite sides of America and have never met, yet they have one powerful decision in common: After years of success as employees in their fields, they have chosen to leave their well-paying jobs and go into business for themselves.

For both, it's somewhat scary. And yet both say it's an opportunity to achieve what might be elusive in the comfortable universes of biweekly paychecks, predictable raises, colleagues to schmooze with, and company benefits.

Says Bannon, who until late 1993 was conference director for the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents, in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., "I wasn't being creative anymore, except in doing more with less. After a while, that becomes a little bit frustrating."

Says Olsen, a certified public accountant and, until November, a $60,000-a-year consultant in San Francisco with the Coopers & Lybrand national accounting firm: "I felt I was getting stagnant. I want to get up in the morning and feel excited about what I'm doing."

Bannon, now a convention-planning consultant, and Olsen, who has a specialized accounting practice, made their career shifts voluntarily, just as many other executives go out on their own.

But as one large U.S. company after another "restructures" and eliminates hundreds or thousands of jobs, more executives than ever are being forced to test their entrepreneurial mettle to meet mortgage payments, make the next semester's tuition payment for a son or daughter in college, stave off bankruptcy, or simply survive.

Whatever their motivation, the executives-turned-entrepreneurs agree on the biggest advantage in working for themselves: autonomy.

Nine years ago, Bob Schreiber left the Bell System and AT&T after 35 years. With two partners, he helped build BLS. The firm does wire and cable installation and offers telecommunications consulting and training. It now has three U.S. locations, a dozen full-time employees, and about $2 million in sales. He says, "You can make your own decisions. There's no one to second-guess you upstairs. The opportunities are much greater than working for a large company."

Together with his wife, Jeanne, a BLS vice president, Schreiber conducts training sessions around the country in subjects he learned while with the Bell System, such as fiber optics, networks, and techniques of wiring. The company also consults with vendors of specialized equipment on how to sell to AT&T and other telecommunications companies.

Schreiber says he has succeeded because BLS's partners, one of whom has retired, had "tremendous personal knowledge, and we were well-trained in that customer service is your No. 1 concern. And we had a network of vendors and manufacturers that we had dealt with at AT&T."

Nonetheless, entrepreneurship can be chancy. Most new small businesses last less than a year, and 87,000 start-ups failed in 1992 alone. What's more, a lot of newcomers to entrepreneurship decide it's not for them and try to return to larger companies. About one-fifth of the thousands of unsolicited resumes that pour into the Paul Ray Berndtson executive recruiting firm, in Fort Worth, Texas, are from people who classify themselves as "owner, entrepreneur, or consultant" and who want back into the corporate cocoon.

No such attitude is part of Marcie Bannon's thinking as she begins building her convention-consulting business in Alexandria, Va. Bannon started toying with the idea of going out on her own about two years ago and carefully began working out a plan to save money and retire some debts so she could feel free to make the break. "A lot of people look at this as 'leaping off,'" she says, "but it's not that at all."

Despite the meticulous preparation, she regards herself as a risk taker, one who "makes forward movement when you can't predict what the outcome will be." After the insurance agents' convention in Hawaii in October, Bannon submitted her resignation to Donald K. Gardiner, the association's executive vice president, who accepted it with reluctance. "I told her to take it one stop at a time," he says. "The danger is that you'll overload yourself. Pick the areas you do best. If you can niche, you can make a hell of a lot of money."

Bannon is beginning her entrepreneurial career with hardly more than the bare essentials: an office, a computer, a fax machine down the hall, and a modem given to her by association colleagues at a farewell party in December.

But her most important assets don't come from mail-order computer houses. They are her knowledge and savvy. She has 15 years' experience organizing conventions-35 of them--from Hartford to Honolulu, and about 200 smaller meetings in between. She regards herself as an expert in the intricate art of convention "scripting"--committing to paper in large volumes every minute of, say, a four-day convention, from the Sunday evening reception to the Tuesday banquet with a keynote speaker to the final "awards ceremony" luncheon on Wednesday.