So You Want To Be A Big Fish

A look at what you'll need to take your business big-time, and two women who have done so - in the most non-traditional of businesses

by Jennifer Echols French

September 1, 2005

Y ou have made it! Congratulations! You took a chance on your dreams and started your own company. In fact, it recently passed the treacherous 4-year survival benchmark* that all small businesses fear. You have a steady stream of operating capital, a couple of part-time employees and a stellar reputation among your customers.

Along the way it's likely that your vision and goals have grown. You see your company a player in the big leagues. You know there is room to expand your product line, to service thousands more clients, to triple your revenue, but you're not sure how to make it happen.

Getting Over The Next Hurdle
How do you grow your business from a one- or two-person shop into a regional, national or even international player? To whom do you turn for advice and support on expanding your operations? What steps do you take to grow your successful small company into a major employer with millions of dollars in revenue?

Certification and procurement are two powerful tools for growth. For some companies, particularly those in nontraditional industries, certification as a woman-owned business can give you a leg up on your competition in procuring business with government and prime contractors, many of them Fortune 1000 companies.

"Certification can be very important to help women-owned businesses grow for what they can gain in federal procurement dollars alone," says Carol McDonnell, director of the Athens office of the Small Business Development Center and chairperson of the Georgia Women Entrepreneurs steering committee. "Five percent of all federal government spending on contracts is supposed to go to women-owned businesses, but so far these firms are receiving only 2.9 percent of these dollars. In 2000, the federal budget for such purchases was about $219.6 billion. The share these businesses are receiving is only $6 billion. Double that, and there's still a lot of money out there."

Training and mentoring in business management, financial management and strategic planning are proven methods to strengthen business skills and help companies grow. For many businesses networking is essential.
 
Georgia companies have access to a wealth of business resources that women business owners can use to take their businesses Big Time. Many consulting and training services are provided by federal and state agencies for free or at nominal cost. Other business owners who seek continuous, intensive hands-on attention can partner with a private small business advisory services firm that will send an advisor into their offices.


Big Builds A Better Future
"Consultancy is the company structure that most women gravitate to," says Deborah Latham, founder and managing member of Georgia Tank Lines, LLC, and winner of several awards recognizing her company's growth.
 
The numbers bear her out. Only one-fifth of the women-owned firms in Atlanta employ others. Latham encourages every woman business owner to "build some-thing bigger than yourself.

"If a woman wants to own a business and she's serious about building a company that's going to be a part of her future, it has got to be something other than a consulting company," says Latham. "If you're a one-woman shop, you're a commodity. You're competing with every other consultant out there. Go find something that you can be good at that a person or company can't go just anywhere to get, something nontraditional that has an infrastructure. That's the kind of business you can grow."

Georgia Tank Lines, headquartered in Doraville, transports gasoline and diesel fuel to gas stations in and around north Georgia. Latham started the company in1996 after working in the petroleum industry 20 years.
 
"I had never worked for a trucking company," she says. "Everything I knew was as a customer. But the service we were provided was so bad that one day I turned to my CFO and said, 'You know what? We're going to get into the trucking industry.' I knew that we couldn't be any worse than what was out there."

Georgia Tank Lines opened with two trucks and four drivers. It has grown to 22 trucks and 29 employees. It's certified as a woman-owned business through WBANC and the NWBOC. Latham credits three key groups for giving her the advice and support she needed to grow: her trucking industry mentors, the CEO Roundtable of the Atlanta Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners, and the University of Georgia Small Business Development Center's business counselors and FastTrac course.

Ready For Takeoff
Jet fuel fires Shirley Gunn's business in Cumming. An independent broker since 1993, Gunn spotted an ad in 2002 for an SBDC course on how to start a small business and decided to attend. "I already knew how to sell fuel," says Gunn, "but I knew there were more opportunities that I could tap into." She attended the course to find out how.

Gunn met several SBDC business consultants there who today she continues to visit for help and advice. She opened her company, The Fuel Desk, in 2003, and within a year had landed her first major contract: to supply 8,000 gallons of aviation fuel to 22 restored antique airplanes flying an air show in Montgomery, Alabama. Her company has since fueled shows in Valdosta and Panama City, Florida, and is preparing bids for shows in Virginia Beach and Biloxi, Mississippi. "I plan to bid this year on the biggest and best air show of the season," says Gunn, "at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, where the Thunderbirds are based."

Certification and procurement are critical to The Fuel Desk's rapid growth. Gunn's SBDC counselor convinced her to get certified by showing how it would help sell her services to government and larger businesses. "As a certified Women's Business Enterprise," says Gunn, "The Fuel Desk meets federal contracting needs, which provides an advantage when I'm bidding against other competitive firms."

Procurement followed certification. After attending classes at the Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center, Gunn pursued a lead on the center's Internet bid match service that landed her the air show in Montgomery. She hasn't looked back. The Fuel Desk now takes up to four employees to every show.

Recover From A Stalled Economy
"We grew rapidly up until 2001, when the economy crashed," says Anne Dillard-Glenn, who bought a business greeting card service 10 years ago and built it into Dated Events, an advertising firm in Dunwoody that makes customized gifts for professional service organizations.

"Our sales volume had climbed to over $1 million and we had leased a big retail shop and showroom. The last three to four years have been challenging, the shop was closed. But we have eight employees now and are again growing," she says.

To help grow the business after she bought it, Dillard-Glenn says she would go to the woman who started the company, and to four or five mentors from her earlier corporate job for advice. "These mentors were my ad hoc board of directors. When I had challenges or issues I couldn't understand, I would call them." Now she attends what she calls "very strong" training seminars provided by her industry association.

Four or five years in, she says she felt like the business had flat tires: "I didn't feel I was running it in the most effective or efficient way." She took the SBDC's FastTrac course with a class of 30 other women business owners whose companies reported revenues of roughly $1 million each.

"This was a very intense course that met every Friday, all day long, for several weeks," she says. "One week was focused on financial issues, another on legal or other issues. They brought in outside speakers and a moderator, and assigned an SBDC business advisor to each business owner. It was the most amazing thing that I'd ever done.

"The talent of my contemporaries was unbelievable. Every woman was incredible in her own way. The ability to be in this group and to be away from the day-to-day issues in business for this period was exactly what I needed to help my business grow."

In Your Corner
Private business organizations, as well as public ones like the SBDC, are there to help take companies to the next level. Ronna Campbell is president of Highlands Management Partners LLC in Alpharetta, a private advisory services company that provides management support, guidance and advice to small business owners.

After nearly 20 years in financial and management positions in major corporations and leading a merger for a company she formed, Campbell became an accredited executive associate with the Institute for Independent Business. This accreditation places her company in worldwide network of more than 2,500 senior business executives who provide practical, hands-on assistance to small businesses.

"We can help a woman business owner deal with the often overwhelming issues of running a business," says Campbell. "We help these companies get structured for growth, basically by walking hand-in-hand with the owner through all of its processes."

Strategies For Growth
No matter the industry, the strategy most often identified by women business owners with growing companies is the care they take in attracting, hiring and keeping their employees. "My first priority is to take incredible care of my employees in a very high turnover industry, because you can't grow if you don't have good truck drivers," says Latham.

"Our top strategy? Increase our sales volume by increasing our knowledgeable sales force," says Dillard-Glenn.

"Then, once you have the employee infrastructure in place, you have to under commit and over deliver," says Latham. "To grow, you have to perform above and beyond expectations and whatever commitments you have made. While this sounds so simple, it's the difference between doing the job expected of you and letting the customer know that you'll jump through hoops to do whatever they need done.

"Look ahead five years all the time, from the standpoint of what you want. Figure out your long-term goals. It is one thing to grow by way of your employees or sales. It is another to be profitable."

* One-third of all small business start-ups will close within two years, one-half within 4 years. (Small Business Administration)

Procurement Is Shorthand For "Big Contracts"
Women-owned businesses with revenues above $1 million are three times more likely than smaller women-owned businesses to have government and large corporations on their client roster, according to the Center for Women's Business Research. Because the scope of services may be different in any given procurement office, here are several good places to start.

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GEORGIA WOMEN'S BUSINESS COUNCIL
678-904-8470
www.gwbc.biz

THE GOVERNOR'S ENTREPRENEUR AND SMALL BUSINESS OFFICE
404-656-6315
www.georgia.org./gsbc/

MINORITY BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT CENTER
404-894-2096
www.georgiambdc.org

SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION GEORGIA OFFICE
404-331-0100
www.sba.gov/ga/