B.E. 100s Neighborhood Improvement - African American business enterprises and executives

Black Enterprise, June, 2001 by Marjorie Whigham-Desir

While on early maternity leave from her position as a regional vice president for Remedy Temps, Lowe got the idea to start her own firm.

The St. Louis native developed a business plan and came up with a company name, Alternative Staffing Group (ASG). She then contacted a former co-worker and friend, Carin Goldberg-Maher, who agreed to help. The two raised $20,000 in angel investor loans from family and friends and Lowe tapped another $8,000 from her credit cards to get started. Armed with a two-year contract from Electronic Data Systems (EDS) estimated at $250,000, Lowe hung out her shingle in a small Century City, California, office in May 1995. The contract called for Lowe's company to provide temporary staffing services for EDS' Los Angeles area locations.

Lowe characterizes those startup days this way: "Carin's job was to recruit people and fill the job offers. I had to recruit the businesses. In other words, I had to catch 'em, and she had to clean 'em and cook 'em."

A year later, Lowe says she decided the company had a "bigger calling" to become a national firm. She developed a business proposal to partner with a large, national staffing company, Adecco, whose client, Southwestern Bell, was looking for a minority-owned staffing firm. Allure Staffing was born from that partnership, eventually becoming Alert Staffing. Lowe signed a five-year contract with SBC Communications, estimated at $12 million, to provide clerical and technical support to their facilities in five states.

The company counts among its largest clients AT&T, SBC Communications, Sprint, Motorola, and Procter & Gamble. When SBC purchased Pacific Bell, the merger more than quadrupled the size and revenue of Alert, skyrocketing revenues from $36 million in 1998 to $163 million in 1999.

Equally important to growing a business is managing it. "Growing this quickly and raising the capital fast enough to manage the growth has been the greatest challenge," says Lowe, who has set her sights on becoming a $1 billion national, if not international, company with"in the next five years. "I'm a person of vision and faith, and I believe that you call it into being everyday. And that is how we work."

BUILDING ECONOMIC BRIDGES

As the former president and CEO of the Michigan Minority Business Development Council (MMBDC), Ronald Hall understood the value of the network his organization provided to bring minority and disadvantaged business owners together with large, majority-owned corporations. His board of directors read like a who's who of the auto industry, including Harold R. Kutner, group vice president of worldwide purchasing for General Motors (GM), and John M. Barth, president and COO of Johnson Controls Inc. (JCI), a $12.7 billion supplier of auto interiors and systems to the Big Three car manufacturers.

In bidding on a contract to supply auto seats to GM, JCI promised it would form a joint venture with a minority-owned firm to build a plant in a Detroit empowerment zone. The company would get the largest single contract ever awarded to a minority by GM and employ residents from the local community. Barth, also vice chair of MMBDC, approached Hall about doing the deal.