Confessions of a "woman-owned business" owner: how I learned to love quotas

Reason, July, 2004 by Tama Starr

Still, the first part of the meeting reduced me to a confused state of complacency. I'm used to competing for jobs, not being helped over the finish line and shown how to fill out payment requisitions. The nice people explained the advantages of being a WOB in such a way that it hardly seemed a boondoggle. After all, they told me, the contractor has to be able to perform the work; getting one's company on "approved vendor" lists is no different from any other form of marketing. Marketing, they explained, is the use of various methodologies to promote one's products or services. They paused for questions.

I'm familiar with the concept of marketing, I told them.

Oh yes, they said, recalling my hundred years in the sign business. They were amazed, they said, by the age of my company. The vast majority of WOBs and MBEs, they told me, are start-ups.

"You don't say," I said. Lulled by all the baby talk, I failed to see where this might be going.

Then came the stumper.

"Why didn't you do this before?" one of them asked me.

"Do what?" I asked, feeling the trap closing.

"You could have applied for dais program nine years ago," she said--rather menacingly, I thought. "Why did you wait until now?" Six expectant pairs of eyes, the whole Rainbow Inquisition, awaited my answer.

That's it, I thought. The jig is up. I'm busted. Trapped. The word will go out to all the banks, and I'll never get another bank job. Or a letter of credit. Or an ATM card. How will I explain this to Jimmy and the boys in the shop?

Then, revelation! I know what I'll do, I thought: I'll come clean. Tell the truth. Throw myself on their mercy. (They may like that.)

"In the past, I was philosophically opposed to it" I admitted carefully. "And now?"

Gulp. "I consider that I was being naive."

My confession evidently satisfied them. It even invited their confidence: For the rest of the meeting they described their frustration at the shortage of applicants. Even they can see that this is a program where administrators outnumber clients. I promised to recommend some if I should think of any.

The Wonder of Womanship

In the end, the bank job was divided among six companies. (There's your 18 percent "utilization rate.") And as with any construction job, if we survived it and even got paid, we considered ourselves geniuses.

So far the principal benefit of my new WOB status is a clutch of complimentary subscriptions to minority- and woman-owned business magazines. Soft-core S&M for the affirmative action set, they feature photos of silver-haired old-boy executives grinning weakly while presenting excellence awards to entrepreneurs who wear their minority-hood and womanship like earned badges of honor.

But WOB isn't just about tangible benefits. It's so much more. I now feel a part of something larger than myself: the great chain of being that tumbles from the well-meaning, through the impractical, to the absurd--replacing the dismal script of capitalism with a delightfully random set of entitlements and rewards.

Tama Start (tstarr@tiac.net) is CEO of the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation in New York City. Her latest book is Signs and Wonders: The Spectacular Marketing of America (Doubleday/Currency).