|  When
she landed her first job as a receptionist at Chase soon after
graduating from C.W. Post with a BA in Psychology, Marci Micciantuono
knew she didn’t want to stay at the front desk for long.
She wanted to be a personnel recruiter and set her mind to it.
She did such a bang-up job that within three months she was no
longer answering phones. From that first job experience,
CEO of the Silestone maker and distributor, Selective Surfaces,
and mother of three learned that giving it your all gets rewarded.
Micciantuono, nee Marci Newman, first saw that growing up on Long
Island. Her father, a senior international banker, instilled in
her drive and a strong work ethic, a sense of commitment, and real
confidence that she could accomplish anything. His efforts netted
the family—her mom, a full time homemaker, a sister 13 months
younger and a brother eight years younger—a comfortable and
adventuresome life. The clan joined him on many of his travels
to Belgium, England, (the former) Yugoslavia, Hong Kong, and Bali. “They
were bonding, enriching, wonderful experiences,” says Micciantuono.
Those trips were also preparation for the worlds of business and
motherhood. (Micciantuono and her husband of 15 years have two
daughters, 11 and 10, and an eight year old son.) So were conversations
around the dinner table. “We were incorporated into dad’s
business life; there never was a children’s table,” she
says. As a result, she learned early on “how to deal with
people and how not to deal with people.” She also learned
the power of a stable, nuclear family and how that makes for a
harmonious home life.
Micciantuono was a VP at CNA Insurance Co. in New York and its
Transition Services Inc., designing corporate severance programs
and managing the administrative tasks associated with them when
she joined the countertop fabricator and installer her husband
started in 1999. She’d been at CNA for three years and before
that served for 11 years as VP-human resources at The Long-Term
Credit Bank of Japan. Although she loved that job, when the Nikkei
plunged, the bank lost the capital requirements it needed to stay
in US and closed shop here. Earlier Micciantuono had spent a year
at Chase.
At the Bank of Japan her first “adult” boss, Frank
Lynch, helped dispel her corporate naiveté and clean up
her act. He’d been a New York City policeman for 20
years, and when she would get emotional and complain, he’d
put it in perspective against the background of homicide or assault.
He also helped her overcome a huge misstep. “In the early
days of my career I simply talked too much, especially at sales
meetings. I thought the only way to participate was to continually
interject my opinions at the expense of others in the meeting.” In
a subtle way, Lynch pointed it out, and while reading a self-help
magazine column on her nightly commute, it dawned on her that she
wasn’t listening. She worked to mend that lapse.
 During her tenure at CNA she spent at least one day a week at
New Brunswick, New Jersey based Selective Surfaces and kept the
company’s books. Motivated by an inflexible business schedule,
she decided to jump ship in January 2003. At that time Selective
Surfaces employed 40 people and had revenues of $6 million. In
2005 it had 83 employees and revenues of $16.4 million. Their 20,000
square foot factory with one $250,000 machine has been supplanted
by two manufacturing facilities with over 60,000 square feet of
space and five state-of-the-art machines that turn out the Silestone.
Home Depot accounts for roughly a third of its sales and new homebuilders
another chunk. Micciantuono thinks that they’re somewhat
insulated from a downturn as they service both new homes and the
remodel/replace countertop segment. While not given to regrets,
Micciantuono admits she wishes she’d have decided to get
involved in the company full-time sooner.
With three children and a fast-paced business to run, her days
are veritable juggling acts. At Selective she runs everything except
the making of the countertops. Sales and marketing report to her.
So do customer service, operations and accounting. Currently she’s
focused on setting up systems to report on productivity and profitability,
and how to market and brand the company as the premiere source
place for quartz countertops. That involves both sponsoring events
for builders and creating consumer demand so customers ask for
her product. Micciantuono’s nights are equally busy attending
various industry functions, like the National Kitchen and Bath
Association and Long Island Builders Institute, on whose boards
she sits.
Running a household, raising children and directing a growing
business puts her in a lot of different places throughout the day. “When
people call my cell phone, they may find me at an industry event,
at a school play, or at the Silestone distributor meeting in Los
Cabos,” she says. “I’m a master at changing gears
so quickly, (usually) without flinching.”
While Micciantuono and her husband divide responsibilities —he’s
looking at where to take the business and whether they should buy
or build a building, their nighttime conversation often revolves
around their shop. “Generally our work day blurs into the
evening,” she says.
Micciantuono thrives on challenges which she faces daily. “I’m
drawn to the ‘puzzle’—a business situation, or
new software—a problem that needs immediate attention. “She
recently spearheaded a huge customer service improvement initiative
that entailed going paperless in their order processing area.
“There were tons of hurdles involved and decisions to be
made on the fly. I like to put out the fire quickly!” It’s
the slow-burning fires of dealing with people who do not have a
strong work ethic or have preconceived notions about the way things
should be that grates her. While she hates to put people on the
street, she has learned to do so with equanimity.
Some of that sense of peacefulness is grounded in the joy of seeing
her company go from being a Mom and Pop shop to a presence in a
very short time span The biggest milestone for her was when the
business passed the $10 million in sales marker in less than four
years after its launch. “When I started, I knew so little
about the stone business and operating a small business,” Micciantuono
says. Her whole exposure was through her husband. But reaching
that sales level showed her that whatever they were doing was working
and it inspired her to strive for more. Her business is now several
years ahead of previous sales projections. “I came from the
corporate world, but I quickly learned what it means to be an entrepreneur,” says
Micciantuono.
When Joselynn See was a National Account Manager for
Virgin Mobile USA, she worked long hours and was rarely home before
7 PM to pick up her business suits or her executive husband’s
shirts. When she did, she often found they were not cleaned to
her satisfaction or that the charges were arbitrary and inexplicable.
“We felt like we were being taken advantage
of with prices mysteriously different on each occasion.And if we
had an issue with how something was cleaned, the company was often
evasive and it was a struggle to get them to clean it again,” says
See, Co-Founder and CEO of www.FlatRateCleaners.com
Such frustrations prompted See and her husband of
six years, Lawrence Chua, to found this customer-focused dry cleaning
company in New York. It offers a 100% quality guarantee and flat-rate
pricing that banishes the surcharges she often found.
 Neither See nor her husband had had any previous
experience in the dry cleaning industry. Both used the skills from
past employment to launch their venture. For See, that meant relying
on three years at Virgin, handling the telcom’s largest accounts.
Because the wireless carrier was just six months old when See joined,
her experience here taught her how to develop a start-up business
and take risks. Earlier employment as corporate operations manager
at Proctor & Gamble taught her how to launch products and build
brands. Both stints convinced her that she didn’t want to
spend her career in a corporate environment. “I didn’t
want to have to wait for my boss to realize that I was doing a
good job for a raise or a promotion. I wanted more control over
my life,” says See, who in her job at Virgin had to be in
Bentonville, Arkansas, every week to meet with her largest account,
Wal-Mart.
Growing up in the Philippines, the oldest of three,
See inherited the entrepreneurial gene from her parents. With meager
savings they started a tropical marine export business which evolved
from her dad’s infatuation with fish: the business began
as an offshoot of his hobby. With perseverance and passion they
became one of the top marine exporters in the Philippines for 30
years, serving clients in Asia, Europe and North America and providing
a comfortable life style that included attending International
School Manila, the most respected and prestigious elementary/high
school in the country and traveling to the US every summer.
On one of these trips she became entranced by Cornell
University and decided to attend here to I major in marketing and
food industry management. This led to an internship and subsequent
job at P&G. While working on her B.A. she met her husband-to-be
and they hatched their entrepreneurial plan.
He left his job at GE Capital to work on the business
plan in 2003, a year before she joined. Growing up in an entrepreneurial
family where dinner discussions always touched on the family business
and its problems, such as employee or export issues, helped her
develop a good basic business sense, and her prior work experience
helped her anticipate potential issues, identify opportunities
and be more confident in making critical decisions. Still there
were surprises that made her think their business plan was idealistic. “It’s
much harder to acquire customers with a web-based business than
we expected,” she admits. Hence, they have had to rethink
whether to pay rent and have a storefront, and they do a lot of
direct mail and distribution of promotional flyers.
See also rues not having launched the business with
more funding. They used their own savings—where as Fresh
Direct started with $200 million in seed money. Look how fast they’ve
grown. “We’d be up to speed and have great customer
awareness a lot faster with a big balance,” she says.
 Other surprises, these pleasant, are how much business
comes from word-of-mouth referrals and the greater than 80% repeat
rate. “Considering that there is a dry cleaner on every other
corner in Manhattan, that’s a pretty good number,” she
says. Happily the company has fewer re-cleans and damaged clothes
to replace than they’d anticipated. Flatrate is also adding
commercial accounts, sprucing up restaurant aprons, hospital lab
coats, and theater company costumes. The business is in the black
and on plan, she adds.
But it is certainly not a tranquil ride. Although
See is “a planner” who likes to create a schedule that
focuses on marketing, customer service, sales and HR, something
new always comes up, forcing her priorities to shift. If a driver
is sick, she has to find a replacement or deliver the clothes herself.
They outsource the cleaning, a practice common in the dry cleaning
industry.
Friends wonder why See would choose such an unglamorous
business. But she finds it glamorous to be doing something really
different, and to have something different to do every day. “It’s
been great to start a revolutionary new company in a relatively
stagnant and mature industry,” she says. There are no brand
names in the dry cleaning industry and online ordering is a new
concept here.
Despite a schedule that changes constantly, See makes sure she
gets to the top priorities of her to-do list and makes time to
take a step back and look at future growth and big-picture issues.
She and her husband have weekly meetings to go over sales figures,
discuss growth opportunities and tackle any problems. “I
heard the horror stories of married partners working together,
but my parents did for over 30 years and that worked fine.”Their
jobs complement each other: he runs finance, IT, and operations,
and they’ve created rules and boundaries to separate their
work and personal lives.
See hopes to build Flat Rate Cleaners as a brand
and bring the concept to different cities where people work long
hours and like the value proposition. And she hopes to launch new
businesses that revolve around making lives of busy professionals
easier. Somewhere down the road she plans on adding children to
the mix, although that might mean having to give up the spare room
she has assigned as a closet for her hundreds of pairs of shoes
and the accessories she designs “in my spare time.” But
as See puts it, “priorities shift.”
 When Susan Polis Schutz was a seven-year-old second-grader
in Peekskill, N.Y., she’d put together a handwritten newspaper
about local goings-on and sold it door-to-door to the neighbors
for three cents each. It was the start of a writing
career that resulted in her poems appearing on more greeting cards
than those of any other writer in history and her being perhaps
the most highly compensated contemporary poet ever.
Thirty five years ago during the flower power era,
Schutz, with her husband of 37 years, Stephen, started Blue Mountain
Arts greeting cards and books based on poetry and feelings. Some
call them rakishly sentimental-—a verse equivalent of Keane
paintings. But no one calls them unpopular: more than half a billion
of her paper greeting cards have sold and over one billion of her
electronic greeting cards had been sent before the dotcom part
of the business was sold. Over 12 million books have been sold
containing Susan’s poems and Stephen’s artwork, and
her poetry has been published worldwide in textbooks, magazines,
and newspapers.
Even as a young girl Schutz, found that that putting
words down on paper worked better than speaking them for her. After
majoring in English and biology at Rider University in Lawrenceville,
New Jersey, she taught for three years: first in New Jersey and
then in Harlem while studying physiology in graduate school at
Long Island University. She met her future husband when he was
completing a PhD in theoretical physics at Princeton. They married
in 1969 and moved to Colorado for his post-doctoral assignment.
In Boulder, in addition to teaching at a local nursery school,
Susan wrote free lance articles for magazines and continued to
write poems.
One evening she showed Stephen one she’d written
to a forlorn friend back in New York, inviting her to come into
the mountains. Stephen, who had gone to the High School of Music
and Art and was an artist on the side, suggested silk screening
it. They liked the result—and the next one was for Schultz’s
dad who was in the hospital.
They made three posters and sold them on consignment
to a Boulder store. These sold quickly and Susan and Stephen decided
to buy a pickup truck and take off around the country, trying to
sell their inventory of silk screened poems to support a year of
traveling. They slept in the back of their pickup truck camper
and in no time had sold out of their posters. Her favorite memory
of the company isn’t the incredible sale of bluemountain.com
but rather their first sale: “when the manager at Hatch’s
bookstore told us our posters had sold out.” They returned
to Boulder to replenish and once again, hit pay dirt. A few more
times of this and by 1971 they had hired their first employee.
As sales grew, the couple added Susan’s mother, June Polis,
as BMA’s first sales manager, and she stayed with the company
for 25 years.
 Not long after, in 1972, Schutz wrote the couple’s
first book, Come Into the Mountains, Dear Friend, named
for the poem that started it all. Recently she wrote her autobiography Blue
Mountain: Turning Dreams Into Reality and To My Daughter,
With Love, On The Important Things In Life in 1998, which sold
over 1.5 million copies.
Growing up in a middle class neighborhood with two
loving parents and a younger brother, with whom she played endless
imaginative games, Schutz attended public schools and had friends
from different ethnic backgrounds which instilled her lifelong
mantra: that all of us share the same planet and heart. “We
weren’t well-off, but we had a rich life,” she recalls.
Schutz worked as a cashier at a drug store, a salesgirl at a discount
store, a chambermaid in a hotel, a waitress, and at a bakery to
help pay for college.
In the early years of the company neither she nor
her husband knew anything about management and made some bad hiring
decisions. Once they engaged a man with a military background to
run their hippie-type firm and they went away for several months.
When they returned, everything was in shambles: “the union
was in the warehouse, employees were picketing, and the organic
garden we’d started had been plowed over,” she said.
From this Schutz learned that you can’t run away when you
own a company and that you should look to promote from within.
She has since done that and all Blue Mountain Arts managers have
been with them for more than 26 years.
In the beginning everyone assumed her husband was
the “boss,” so Schutz took the title of president.
One poem she penned then expressed how she was treated.
“Can you type?”
“No!”
Can you file?”
“No!”
“Can you take shorthand?”
“No!”
“How about simple bookkeeping?”
“No!”
“What on earth can you do?”
“Everything you can!”
In 1983, on a visit to a shopping center, Schutz
saw what looked like her cards with Hallmark’s trademark.
Earlier, Schutz and her husband had turned down the giant card
company’s offer to work together in some capacity. Aggrieved,
they wrote letters and hired lawyers and got a run-around before
suing. The case documented in legal briefs, went to the U.S. Supreme
Court, which ruled that their “trade dress” was protected.
Hallmark had to abandon the cards and award them money.
A few years later Microsoft approached them about
bluemountain.com.Soon after this meeting, Microsoft blocked the
delivery of their electronic greeting cards and created their own.
This time Susan and Stephen were not as emotionally involved but
just as diligent. They sued and in 1998 won an injunction. “Though
I’m still basically a shy person, if something is unfair,
my shyness disappears and I fight like crazy to end the injustice,” she
says.
They’d created the online version of the company in 1996,
when Stephen Schutz devised an electronic greeting card to send
to one of their three children, Jared, when the couple realized
they had forgotten to send their at-college son a birthday card.
Within hours Jared phoned and instructed his parents to build a
Web site. Later that year, bluemountain.com debuted with 29 electronic
greeting cards.
By 1999 bluemountain.com was offering dozens of other cards and
became one of the Internet’s most visited sites. In October
that year, nearing the peak of the dot-com mania, Excite@Home.com phoned to try to buy bluemountain.com as the lynchpin in the media
empire the high-flying broadband provider had decided to build.
This time the Schutzes didn’t send their wooer packing: instead
they accepted the offer estimated at more than $750 million. (Two
years later Excite sold bluemountain.com to American Greetings
for only $35 million in cash.)
The Schutzes still own and run the ink and paper
company although they have a president and managers attending to
the day-to-day affairs, leaving Schutz free to work on what inspires
her. It could be writing –she still creates (on yellow pads
of paper) around five percent of the poems for some of the 800
cards the company makes annually—or working on one of the
two documentaries she’s filming. She regularly talks with
BMA managers, and they formally meet four times a year to make
strategic decisions, such as what new products to add. Recently
that included new greeting cards on handmade paper, mini books
and parchment scrolls. They do no focus groups but test by putting
an item in the marketplace to see what works at their 12,000 accounts
like Cracker Barrel. Eighty out of 100 don’t because they “communicate
the wrong feelings,” says Schutz.
The arrangement allows Schutz time to work on charitable
and civic interests like cancer research, banning nuclear war,
and improving women’s health. While Schutz dismisses the
idea of goals—“I work in passion, not goals,” she
admits that she savors the sense of accomplishment that comes from
seeing a germ of an idea go through the creative process, resulting
in books and greeting cards that become best-sellers and that communicate
feelings that people need to say to each other. “We frequently
hear from people who have purchased our cards and read our books
who tell us how much their lives have been changed as a result.”
 Back
in 1996, when Judith Briggs and her four sons were preparing to
move from one home to another and she didn’t
have a vehicle large enough to ferry unwanted stuff to the dump,
she called a local chuck-in-a-truck type to haul it away for her. «Chuck» arrived
in torn jeans and a dirty T-shirt hours after he had promised to
be there, made a mess cutting off the legs of an old sofa so he
could get it out and didn’t clean it up, and by the time
he’d steered his dilapadated truck out of the driveway, he
left with considerably more of her money than she’d expected
to pay. Six years later Briggs’ new (second) husband
pointed out an article he’d read about 1-800-junk.
He thought
it was an interesting niche market, and after studying its website
and making two lengthy interview calls, she agreed. Within six
months she’d bought a franchise in Worcester, MA (she later
added one in Boston West) and was on her way to taking the Sanford
and Son idea of junk removal right up to the Jetson’s era.
In her first month in business the phone rang continually,
and with just one truck Briggs did three times the revenue she’d
projected in the business plan that she had created. The 42-year-old
owner/general manager now has 22 employees and six trucks and expects
to do $1.2 million this year in revenue, $2 million next in 2007
and $3 million in 2008. She finished 2005 at $760,000 and by 2011,
she anticipates the franchise will generate $4 million and employ
12 trucks. But the growing cost of waste disposal in Massachusetts
and the limited resources for dumping cut into profits. Dump fees
range from $95 to $130 per ton because there are no landfills.
She uses transfer stations, as all the junk must be transported
out of Massachusetts.
Her team makes around 25 calls a day, seven days
a week. The two franchise areas cover 1.25 million people. Her
husband, Richard, plans to leave the police force to run that one.
The business is working because Briggs is very hard
working and her professional uniformed drivers arrive on time in
clean shiny trucks and do all the lifting, loading and clean up.
(After, they recycle or donate to charity many of the items.) Aside
from being stunned by the immediate success of the venture, Briggs
was also surprised by how much fun it is—and what good feelings
it generates helping people de-clutter their lives.
While junk is junk and garbage is smelly, Briggs
has, on occasion, been on the scene when the two converged. “We’ve
dealt with compost in the dead of summer when it’s wet and
randy and homes that have been closed up for a while with food
still in the fridge,” she says. Other interesting hauls have
included prosthetic legs, a fake hand grenade, Civil War memorabilia,
a giant stuffed Rottweiller and animal carcasses from a vet’s
office. She couldn’t take a boat or a grand piano. Seventy-five
percent of her business is residential—the average job bills
$350 to $400—and everyone has an interesting story about
the part of his or her life that her team is carting off.
Briggs’ own story began in Quincy, MA, an only
child of a single mom who worked at a local hospital in the X-Ray/nuclear
medicine department. Thinking she wanted to be accountant, Briggs
attended a junior college to earn an associate degree and for the
next 13 years worked as an accountant at Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
She enjoyed her assignment and colleagues but not the $35,000 a
year salary. She had divorced and was a single mom for nine years.
Her husband wasn’t contributing enough to cover a comfortable
life for the four boys, and even with several promotions and attendant
raises she thought about making more money.
In 1997 she took a higher paying job at a medical
billing company. The three years there were highly stressful. “Doctors
get angry when insurance companies don’t pay them and I constantly
had to explain what I was doing to get their money,” she
says. In 2000 she grabbed a chance to work nearer home doing human
resources for an electrical company. It would allow her to spend
more time with her boys—now 21-year old twins, and a 17 and
14 year old. All of them work for the company.
While working in 1994 she returned to school and
over 22 months completed her BA part-time, a feat she says proved
to be an invaluable lesson for her children in planning their own
education. In 1996 she received her BS in business administration
from Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, MA. And in May 2006, while
running her own business full time, she will complete an MBA from
Anna Maria College in Paxton, MA. “For a long time I didn’t
know what I wanted to be when I grew up; now I know,” says
Briggs.
She also knows that risk is not something to avoid
in business. “You
can always grow into the business,” she says, berating herself
for not starting out on a larger scale and being more aggressive
in the start-up phase.
 Growing up, Briggs watched her single mom work extremely
hard to provide for the two of them. By age 12, she was already
pitching in, working at a cousin’s electronics shop and after
she got working papers at a hospital’s kitchen. Hard work
is essential but it’s not the only necessary ingredient:
flexibility and the ability to make rapid-fire decisions are critical,
says Briggs, who often surprises customers by jumping out of a
junk truck to do estimates—or even hauls—in a skirt
and heels.
While her days start with truck team meetings and
progress into networking, coaching, researching new resources,
data analysis and working on marketing and sales, things can and
do go awry. Hence the heels at job sites. “People don’t
fail nearly as often as systems do,” says Briggs who is methodical
about mapping out systems, adjusting them when necessary and sticking
to them. No sense for one truck to crisscross town so on Monday’s
it’s it this neighborhood and on Tuesdays in another. An
extra truck strategically parked serves as a marketing tool when
not replacing other trucks being repaired.
For someone who spent 18 years in an office, Briggs
admits what she enjoys least about her new business is the paperwork. “I
prefer to be moving and a grooving,” she laughs. And doing
it in a male-dominated industry only adds to the excitement. “Sometimes
it seems like I am living the life of one of Charlie’s Angels.”
|
