Home-based and still a business - Kim Gordon manages her marketing consulting company at home - company profile

Nation's Business, July, 1990 by Sharon Nelton

Home-Based And Still A Business She was the marketing vice president of a $2.5-billion-a-year real-estate sales company in the Washington, D.C., area. But, fed up with the politics and bureaucracy of corporate life, Kim T. Gordon quit the fast track two years ago and started her own business, Marketing and Communications Counsel, at her home in Silver Spring, Md.

Gordon says she used to think that corporate success would make her happy. But, she says, "I found that I was spending so much less time doing what I thought was fun, which was the work. I wasn't loving it anymore."

In her own business, Gordon, 35, offers clients strategic planning services in marketing and communications, and she contracts with other to implement the plans. Instead of taking a commission or a markup on the work that her subcontractors or "affiliates" do, she charges a flat fee ranging from $5,700 to $9,000 for the initial plan and then $95 an hour for her services as coordinator of the implementation. "Companies used to charge hundreds of dollars an hour for my services," she says.

Her fee structure saves her clients about 40 percent of what they would have to pay under more customary payment systems, Gordon says. In her first full year of business, she made $15,000 more in personal income than she had made as someone else's employee.

Setting up shop at home was a decision made possible by technology. With a computer and other electronic tools, Gordon says, she can do "what traditionally would have taken myself, a personal secretary, and a marketing assistant to do."

Working from home was not dictated by domestic concerns. Gordon has no children, and her husband, Stephen Mizner, media director for an advertising agency, is a gourmet cook.

She calls it "so unfair" to measure businesses primarily by the size they achieve. "We [women] don't have the same way of measuring our success," she says. For her, success means "delivering a very high quality product to my client, feeling great about it, watching them reap the rewards of it, and also having a personal lifestyle that I enjoy. If I can do that and make money, that's what it's all about."

Gordon, whose company is a sole proprietorship, aims at growth of about 10 percent a year and expects that eventually she'll have a staff of perhaps four people. "I think this company has to grow like any other, but I never want it to be big."

Gordon is sensitive to criticism that women are creating jobs for themselves, not creating businesses. Says she: "I have created a business with a business plan, with business goals, with an ongoing marketing program, with professional signed agreements with other companies, and with ongoing contracts with clients." She expects revenues of $80,000 to $100,000 this year.

And, as her business grows, she says, she's not going to move to a location outside her home. "I'm going to buy a bigger house."