Ask a busy person: Gail Eagle

Mercer Business, Jul 01, 1996 by Delany, Don

Gail Eagle is the head of a flourishing publishing firm in this area, and she is eager to open doors for others, particularly for women, to become entrepreneurs like herself.

She manages to find many hours away from her busy schedule with her company to devote to teaching, encouraging and otherwise easing the way for those who would like to go into business for themselves but lack the basic skills that would insure their success.

Eagle is president of Gail Eagle Associates, the custom publishing company based in East Brunswick, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary next January. The firm publishes eight magazines, among which are the well-known and popular Discover Guides of New Jersey. These include Discover Mercer County, Discover Middlesex County and Discover Monmouth County, valuable guides for business, for residents and for visitors to the areas.

"Each is a little different from the others, depending on the county itself," Eagle notes. "For example, the Monmouth guide focuses a little more on tourism."

Other publications include the Family Guide for Parents and Kids, which was the firm's lone product when Eagle launched it almost a decade ago; Princeton Area Life Relocation magazine, Western Monmouth Panorama and the membership directories of the Princeton Area and the Middlesex Regional Chambers of Commerce.

A new division of the firm, Your Publishing Partner, produces newsletters and offers publishing services for other publishers, such as graphic and advertising design, editorial, photography and sales representation. "We have the expertise to offer these services to other publishers as well as to our own clients," Eagle says.

To make that expertise available to others, Eagle serves as seminar leader in Mercer County Community College' s Small Business Development Center. There she teaches a Pre-Business Workshop for Women, a course she says is designed to help women get started in the world of business.

"That is something I always felt I would do," she adds, "and it's something I love doing. I get so much from it. Really much more than I give, not only from the sense of satisfaction I get from giving something back to the community but because of the way it sharpens my business skills. It' s really a kind of refresher course for me, because the things we focus on in the workshop, organization, management, the importance of teamwork, I apply in my business."

In 1993 Eagle seized the chance to share her business expertise with a group of people to whom the concept of free enterprise had been, until then, a foreign one. She went to Russia, under the auspices of Herb Spiegel's Mercer County College department, to teach small business planning at the Civil Engineering Institute in Volgograd.

Three years ago Eagle helped found a group called Women in Partnership, another group which helps women get started in careers in business. "Having worked in the area for a long time I realized that women in business did not have the history of the "old boy network" that men have. Women in Partnership was formed to give women a network with other women, to advise them, not only on women's issues but on business issues. The organization awards several scholarships each year to young women interested in furthering their business education.

Business groups are not the only beneficiaries of Eagle's volunteer efforts. She is on the board of directors of Junior Achievement of Central New Jersey and McCarter Theatre in Princeton, and active with the March of Dimes, the Eden Institute and the New Jersey Association of Women Business Owners.

For the March of Dimes and the Eden Institute, she assumes a leading role in planning their annual fundraising dinners. She points with satisfaction to the tremendous growth in recent years of the Eden Institute's programs to assist autistic persons. Earlier this year, Eagle was awarded the Middlesex County Regional Chamber of Commerce/NatWest Bank Small Business Leadership Award for 1996. The award recognizes creativity and oustanding effort to improve relations between business and the community.

Eagle is originally from New York City, and she and her husband, Gene, came to this area in search of a better place in which to raise their family. They found it in East Windsor Township. "We loved the sense of community, the sense of suburban living here," she says. "Then when I started working here I realized it was as good a place for business as it was for family life."

She still lives in East Windsor. Her husband, Gene Eagle, is vice president for information services for Dun and Bradstreet in North Jersey. They have a son, Scott, 27, who is an account manager for WGMS, a classical music radio station in Washington, D.C., and a daughter, Dana, 25, an actress who recently returned from a four-month tour with a family theater group production of "The Wizard of Oz."

Eagle enjoys the theater, tennis and travel, as well as surfing on the Internet. "These days I am sleeping less and at the computer more," she says.