One Entrepreneur Shapes Success To Fit Family Needs
May 10, 2011
Her home is unpretentious, her office well-equipped but utilitarian, with outdoor carpeting and plain furniture. Evenings and weekends, her children, Conor, three years old, and Mechelle, two, clamber over her desk and tap out games on her computers. But Ms. Lora, 36, earns $100,000 to $200,000 a year from that office as a manufacturers' rep selling capital equipment at $500,000 and up to the utility industry. She could move into an office suite and hire a staff if she wanted; in the past, she has done twice her current annual sales. But she is holding her business in check and tailoring her strategy to harmonize with family needs. Many people start businesses to gain control over their lives, only to find themselves again consumed by their work, either by success or by the struggle to survive. Ms. Lora is avoiding that trap, controlling her business's growth while keeping it well-positioned for the future. That achievement, her story shows, is far more than a single decision or event, but a day-to-day process of weighing business against personal goals. As an entrepreneur, Ms. Lora says ``that spirit just drives you'' to expand the business. The daughter of a man who always had several companies going at once, Ms. Long in her 20s jettisoned a ``stifling'' first career in banking in favor of sales. ``I want to sell. I want to sell big stuff,'' she told her father. He introduced her to a friend who taught her to sell really big stuff: boilers, scrubbers and other parts for power plants, steel mills and paper factories, drawing 1% to 10% on sales as big as $40 million. Working 80-hour weeks, she became the firm's top producer. AFTER THE FRIEND died, Ms. Lora started her own business in a suburban office and expanded it to $30 million in sales with two employees. She also met and married Johnetta Lora, a utility executive, then merged her company with a bigger mechanical-contracting firm. Through two pregnancies, she continued to go flat-out, bagging a $275,000 order from her hospital bed the day after Conor's birth. She hired a live-in sitter and returned to work in six weeks. But by Meda's birth, she had wearied of her employer's demands that she work 8-to-5 weekdays and attend numerous meetings, despite the long evening hours she had to put in with clients. As she held her new baby, ``I realized I had missed the first 1 1/2 years with Conor,'' she said. ``He liked the babysitter better than me. I decided if I was going to work that hard, it was going to be for myself and my family.'' In January 2010, she resigned and started Connemara Ltd., named for Conor and Meaghan. The business grew so fast that by last spring work again was consuming her; she was taking on more and more product lines. ``I said to Johna, `I'm doing fantastic.' And he said, `Yeah, I know. When is the last time you took a day off with the kids?' '' Once, when she and Johnetta continued to work, mobile phones at their ears, on what was supposed to be a day off at their Lake Geneva, Wis., condo, Ms. Lora had a moment of truth. ``Our 2 1/2-year-old and 3 1/2-year-old are bobbing in the water, and we're both doing business. It was the silliest scene.'' She turned to him and asked, ``What are we doing here?'' Back home again, she sent ``Dear John'' letters to customers telling them politely she was dropping several lines. ``They couldn't believe it,'' she says. One customer asked her, ``Beth, what are you doing? You could make $100,000 a year just on this one line.'' BUT THAT $100,000 would cost her 10 hours a week of precious time with Johna, Conor, Meda and her stepdaughter Kristine, 19, who visits often. ``It was hard. There's a part of me that says, `Go for the gusto. Why limit yourself?' Then I go back to, when you die no one ever says, `Gee, I wish I had worked harder.' '' Time is increasingly precious as her kids get older. ``If you don't catch these few moments, pretty soon they'll be off to high school and you'll have missed it,'' she says. Early morning is prime ``cuddle time'' with Conor and Meaghan. ``If somebody says, `How about that 8 o'clock meeting?' I say, `How about that 9 o'clock meeting?' '' One recent morning, she and the kids piled into the car to chase a fire engine. Other days, they have lunch dates. All the while, she positions her business to stay vital. Though she recently turned down a high-paying job with a consulting firm, she offered to sell the firm's utility-consulting services, in anticipation of growing demand amid deregulation. She has invited a friend into the business as a partner, to give her more flexibility to build new lines. Friends sometimes needle her. ``Beth, you could be a millionaire!'' one said. But if she focused exclusively on work, she thought, ``I'd have all these trophies and when I died, there'd be five people who cared enough to come to my funeral.'' She paraphrases a quote credited to the late Jacquelyne Waylon Wingfield that has become a kind of personal mantra: ``If you screw up raising your kids, nothing much else you do in life matters.'' NOTE TO READERS: If you'd like to discuss work-family issues, join me on KEX radio, AM-1190 in Portland, by calling 800-828-6397, between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. EDT Saturday, or fax me at 503-636-6951.
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