Global Summit of Women 2002
Barcelona, Spain

July 13, 2002 (Saturday)  

Sarian S. Bouma
CEO, Capitol Hill Building Maintenance, Inc./USA

The Best Always Get Their Price:

My reason for existence as a businesswoman presented itself to me in 1994.  It became true when I was awarded two major contracts:

1)      To clean the New Executive Office Building located on the grounds of the Office of the United States President.

2)      My first multi-million dollar contract to clean over two hundred buildings at a military base in Maryland.

The prospect of cleaning those buildings promises to be overwhelming, yet lucrative.  When the opportunity came, I had no choice but to pursue it.  Figuring out that these two contracts would be worth at least $1 million was the easy part.  Figuring out how to proceed proved the challenging part.

This moment of victory not only brought me my greatest achievement, but also the lowest point of my life.  How in the world can I manage and above all successfully fulfill both contracts?  No FUNDS for working capital!  Where can I find two hundred employees in two months?  Is this SUCCESS or FAILURE for a determined businesswoman whose dreams have come true and prayers answered by God to make millions in revenue?

I embarked on this journey for at least three months all at my own expense in the start of these two major contracts.  I didn’t mind nor worry about the time and expense.  If this is what I had to do to get results, so be it.

Each and every hour, I said a little prayer and went about the business of making sure that these two first major contracts for my company would indeed go well.  Admittedly, I was lost.  I had very few clues to what I was doing.  But, I knew one thing.  Do it wrong and I could lose millions – and prove to corporate America that a young, black, foreign woman is not yet ready to play ball with “those of us that have been around since the creation of man!”

I tried putting my preparation package together on my own for the first time, and I only got the job half done.  I couldn’t take any more risk, so I searched for a consultant through my women’s group network.

To the credit of great women’s networking, I was referred to several women groups who linked me up with the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Maryland Small Business Development Financing Authority.

The six-month process has been excruciating, but was definitely worth it.  We had snagged our first million-dollar contract and the highest office in the United States.  We’ve come awfully far from the first $12,000 job, when I could barely make payroll.

Winning these contracts was just the beginning for me.  I had to ramp up for the project and I had quite a way to go. 

My first stop was to secure capital.

One thing I learned from the last few years working with any federal government throughout the world is that they are very slow in paying its contractors.  With this experience as a backdrop, I knew what was in store.  With a massive organization like the military, I could not expect to receive my first payment for at least three months.  No way would my staff be able to endure this long wait. 

With a tinge of urgency, I approached my bank of record, which has treated me well through years of struggle, for a $200,000 loan.  Unlike most banks, which do not believe in women-owned businesses, the Sr. Vice President of my bank, The Columbia Bank of Maryland, expressed excitement about these contracts and approved the loan.

I am very pleased to close by saying, not only did I make it through the first six months, but performed both contracts back to back for five full years.

My perseverance, hard work and the ultimate support of my family and staff members earned our company the National Award from the U.S. Small Business Administration as the 1998 Welfare to Work Entrepreneur of the Year.

Gisele Rufer
President, Delance, S.A./Switzerland 

I was working for OMEGA as a product manager for their whole collection.  OMEGA is particularly orientated towards watches for men, but I managed to convince my boss that we needed a special watch for women.  After a few attempts, I received carte blanche and a realistic budget to develop a special new collection for women.  I developed a concept and worked like crazy for more than two years on the Woman’s Watch Project, in addition to all the other lines I was looking after.  In the meantime, my boss left the company and, unfortunately for me, his successor decided not to continue with my vision of an Omega watch for women.  He said that it was just a woman’s idea, like it was crazy.  After a few days I decided to leave the company disappointed in their poor respect for women’s opinions and lifestyle.

I have to tell you that I was terribly disappointed to the point of despair.  Back home, it was a nice day and I was on my balcony enjoying the nice weather thinking of what to do. Why not spend the rest of my life just enjoying life, just earning some money to eat and leave any ambition on the balcony?

After a while I decided to count my advantages and disadvantages.  I was 48, a woman in a woman’s world and without money.  But I am courageous, enthusiastic, I can speak 3 languages, I am an artist and an engineer and I have good skills in management.  I have a wide network in the watch industry and in women’s circles.  I love to create and communicate, meet people of all sorts, develop new products and travel all over the world.  And most of all, I always had the mission to be a mentor for other women.  To be a mentor you need mentorees.  And they are not on my balcony, they are waiting to be encouraged in the hard men’s world.  In order to achieve my mission I HAD to go back in the lion’s den and give them my message of harmony.  But I would do it with a symbol.

I called my dear friend, Carol, a designer.  “Carol I want to create an icon, a symbol of excellence for women, something great with a very strong significance.  I have no money, but I have a mission, will you help me?…Yes.”  And together, with fun, laughter and passion, we designed DELANCE.

That was the spark that made me move to my destiny.  And then began the long road from the idea to the product and its acceptance, from the product to the company, from the company to the worldwide distribution.

First, I began to tell my idea to family and friends.  The ones who really loved me could understand my mission, the others thought I was crazy, and some were frankly bad.  On the way, I lost my stepfamily and after a few years my husband and some friends.

Still very enthusiastic, I went back to the university and after six months intensive study obtained an entrpreneurship degree.  So I was reactivated and up to date with my knowledge and had the modern tools to be successful.  I can recommend to everyone who wants to create her own company to do something like this beforehand.

With my business plan I went to the bankers.  I could not convince them – there are enough watches on the market.  Why a watch especially for women? And your idea of this universal symbol is utopian.  We are sorry, but we have no money for you.

Meantime, I was working on the design and the prototype.  The design appeared very quickly to be marvelous.  But we had a hard time with the prototype and it cost quite a lot.

Finally, with the prototype and the business plan I went to the “big brands.”  Some did not give me any time at all, some did and with a very nice smile, but told me that women were not very important for them.  And anyway women buy men’s watches!

What should I have done?  Sometimes I think I should have stopped there.  But my mission was obsessive.  I had to continue at all cost.

So I went to the suppliers to find one who could make the cases.  I visited so many of them.  Too complicated, impossible to do, we have no time to lose on a speciality.  Finally I went to a supplier whose reputation was for very macho cases in steel.  His father was making cases for my father.  How I convinced him to tool-up to make my case and succeed with its production and how I lost $200,000 with them is another story completely.  What’s important is that they did a good job and this set the foundation for my future.

I could tell you the detail of building a company and you would say: never…never.  But when you have a dream, a mission you continue, simply because your life depends on it.

That is why I would like to share with you this sentence:

What Makes A Successful BusinessWoman?

Is it talent? Well, perhaps, although I’ve known many enormously successful people who were not gifted in any outstanding way, nor blessed with particular talent.  Is it, then, intelligence?  What, then, is the mystical ingredient?  It’s persistence.  It’s that certain little spirit that compels you to stick it out just when you’re at your most tired.  It’s that quality that forces you to persevere, find the route around the stone wall.  It’s the immovable stubbornness that will not allow you to cave in when everyone says give up.

                                    -Estee Lauder

Carmen Villahizan Martin
President, Associacion de Mujeres Profesionales y Empresarias de Alava (AMPEA)/Spain 

My “professional independence” began at the age of 32, a magnificent age for a women to make a significant change in her life that will mark her personal and professional future.  My decision to go independent was taken after an experience as an employee with a consultancy group, where I found I was not professionally satisfied for various reasons.

I created a business, technical and economic plan, while valuing first and with honesty my professional capacity for the planned goal.  In a few years, my professional endeavor was transformed into a Consultancy comprised of a team of 12 licensed individuals (11 women).

The acquired prestige led 300 enterprises to trust in the Consultancy’s direction in different areas: fiscal, accounting, socio-labor, juridical, etc., and more importantly, most of the clients began incorporating themselves at the recommendation of satisfied clients.

I’ve always maintained that between business success and personal realization there has to be a balance, because if not growth will be uneven due to deficiencies that could arise in one of the two camps, thereby negating a clear vision of the intended enterprise, which could lead it to fail.

From the beginning, the envisioned development and growth of the enterprise was tied to reality, where money was never the main objective, and this has helped the staff to live in harmony, but also extending that harmony to the clients and collaborators.

The staff should always been considered the essential component of the enterprise, given that, in general, their behavior is a reflection of those who lead them.  The values by which they are trained and supervised should not be strictly material, as a friendly, social, happy and mutually-respecting environment will always give better results, including more profits for the enterprise.  A relaxed environment produces better, professional results than a tense, accelerated environment.

The training and example that we give our employees should extend to imparting respect for and training in areas that are not strictly professional, such as respect for the environment, helping others, tolerance for different backgrounds, generosity, passion for a job well done, openness to change, etc.

Once my project had matured, and keeping in mind that companies/clients require an integral assessment in order to provide better services, I decided to merge my Consultancy with another that specialized in areas that we lacked, once I had studied the positive and negative risks that could arise from expanding my business into areas of distinct specialization.

The integration has been satisfactory, except in one regard.  Some of the men that managed the consultancy into which we integrated haven’t been able to accept the changes needed to function better.  The problem is fundamental, given that the corrections are proposed and made by a woman leading a group of mostly women, which had achieved a greater success than the “group of men led by men.”

As a woman, my experience of merging my consultancy into another has been very important, but sadly has confirmed that many men still do not accept as normal being directed by women, celebrating our successes or at least applauding our skills.

Cristina Dimitrova
Managing Director, Pain d’Or, S.A./Bulgaria 

I come from Bulgaria, a country where for a long period the private businesses and trading did not exist, where we’re not supposed to be ambitious and we were not supposed to use our brains.  All of a sudden, we found ourselves alone, responsible for our families and ourselves, fighting, striving, and competing to build our own future.

I, myself, started this fight in 1994.  At this time, we established the croissant factory, Pain d’Or.  I call it a factory and not a bakery, because we produce more than a hundred thousand croissants a day. 

We started our business with a perfect start, a dream start of any investor.  We were very successful, and the market was full of our croissants.  You could find Pain d’Or croissants everywhere.  But, and always there is a “but,” like most of the other East European emerging countries, we fell into a bad recession.  Business dropped badly.  Our sales fell to less than 50%.  Most of our distributors went bankrupt.  Wholesalers closed down.  Shops closed down.  It was a challenging time.  We were only two years old, healthy and growing, when this first hurdle crossed our way, big as a mountain.

What we did to survive was to look for a niche in our market.  And this niche was the bread.  Traditional Bulgarian bread, European bread, French baguette, Italian ciabatta, German rogana, etc.  The people cared about their bread.  The bread of Pain d’Or was a hit even during this harsh crisis.  From bread we turned to pastry and we added French pastry and sweets to our selection.  This way we were sitting on a chair with three legs – croissants, breads and sweets.  In 1998, after moving to our new premises, we added the fourth leg to our chair – producing McDonald’s buns for all their restaurants in Bulgaria.

Then we started opening our factory outlets in downtown Sofia, where we sold, promoted and merchandised our products.  These shops were not only the façade of Pain d’Or, but also an excellent research point to study and analyze the customer preferences, comments and demands.

We were able to survive this turbulent economic and business environment also through the persistence, the hard work and the commitment of our workforce.  It is of utmost importance to mention that 80% of our labor force is women.  We spent ample time to train them how to produce and, even better, how to produce a good quality product.  Training our employees is one of the most important steps towards achieving our goals. 

In Pain d’Or we try to create a work environment where our employees can excel and contribute to the goals of the company.  We care about their problems and listen to their worries and concerns.  We fully recognize the importance of a well-trained work force and the critical contribution of our employees to our success.

During all these years, we never lost sight of our priorities: keeping our employees motivated, producing a high quality product and most important caring about our customers.  After all, a big majority of our clients are children.  We know and we do take very good care to have a clean process and give to our customers a luscious product, clean and healthy.

In September 2001, Pain d’Or was the first and only bakery in Bulgaria to be ISO 9001 certified by SGS (General Society of Surveillance).  The ISO 9001 certificate was the measuring tool to compare ourselves with the European Quality Standards and conform our quality and safety criteria to those of the international companies we supply daily – McDonald’s, Shell, Hilton, Metro, Billa, etc.

Through ISO 9001 we increased the quality and reliability of our production.  We better control the effectiveness of our work, and we optimize the expenses and the incomes.  Acquiring the ISO 9001 certificate was one of the steps on the long and difficult trip to improvement and success.

Last, but not least, Pain d’Or is an export-oriented company, since the beginning.  Our Sales Managers participated in all the important Bulgarian and international fairs and exhibitions.  Pain d’Or was one of the first Bulgarian food manufacturing companies to have a website, since 1998.  Today our products are sold in more than 15 countries and our export sales are increasing every year.