Leaving the corporate nest - corporate executives as self-employed; includes related articles

Nation's Business, March, 1987 by Harry Bacas

She opened an office in a building where she could share telephone and secretarial services with other tenants. She lived on a monthly draw provided by industry friends who had agreed to back her venture.

That year, 1982, business was terrible. Interest rates were 18 percent, and the market in cable systems was dead.

"I closed only one deal, and I thought, "Is this how it's going to be?' But the next January I closed another deal and that was it.'

Two years later, she was able to buy out her partners for their $110,000 investment and became sole owner of the Pat Thompson Company.

Her sales soared to 11 in 1985 and reached 32 last year, for a gross of $150 million.

Her company has 11 employees, including eight brokers (all male), and her monthly office overhead is $87,000, more than her total budget in her first year in business.

She says the operation of a successful business provides her with many rewards. There is great satisfaction, she says, in "the knowledge that you could go out and put together a million-dollar deal.'

Pat Thompson doesn't think she could have done it without the experience of those corporate jobs.

"At Jones I learned an awful lot,' she says. "I learned that when you are negotiating a deal in a room full of attorneys--all of them men--and you see something that's not right, you speak up, even if you are a woman. Actually, being a woman has been an advantage. Men have bigger egos, and that can sometimes keep a deal from being settled, whereas a woman usually can compromise better.'

Another thing, she says, is that "when you start out on your own, you're afraid to let people know you don't have the answers. So you go out and screw up. Eventually you learn you can ask questions.

"If I were doing it again, there are two things I would do differently:

"I would not be undercapitalized; I would have more money to start with.

"And I would have a board of directors to give me guidance.'

For Don Jacobs, as for Dallen Peterson and Bob Phipps, going into business was a man-and-wife effort.

Call the home-based company in Gonzalez, La., and Phoebe Jacobs greets you with, "Gourmet Spices, God bless you.'

The company is only two years old. Its full name, Gourmet Spices by La-Don, and its motto, "Tres Bien (Very Good),' were chosen "to sound French' and to emphasize the Cajun style of its line of seasonings and dry mixes for frying fish and making gumbos, etouffes and jambalayas.

Neither Don nor Phoebe is French, but they have lived in Louisiana's French-speaking Cajun country for 20 years.

Don Jacobs worked for 10 years as Southeast sales manager for a national publishing company producing advertising magazines for auto dealers and other businesses. As a sideline, Jacobs published a cookbook using Phoebe's Cajun recipes.

One place that carried the cookbook was a local wholesale seafood market. It also produced a line of seafood seasonings. The owner asked Jacobs about working for him on the seasonings line. "I told him no,' Jacobs says, "because his product and his packaging were not attractive.'