The Hottest Entrepreneurs in America

Profiles of more winners and recognition-worthy entrepreneurs from the Entrepreneur of the Year contest.

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Who they are, how they got started, and what you can learn from them. Plus, profiles of the smartest start-up, the best turnaround, and other national winners

Do-It-Yourself Training
With all the headaches he had to deal with in running his young, fast-growing business, it's surprising that Paul Silvis would decide to take up teaching. But that's just what Silvis, president and founder of Restek Corp., in Bellefonte, Pa., found himself doing.

Admittedly, the subject was one near to Silvis's heart: Restek itself. He and Anthony Cepullio, the vice-president of the seven-year-old, $6.4-million manufacturer of gas chromatography products, decided their supervisors needed some training -- many were young people who had grown with the company to become managers for the first time. So Silvis and Cepullio sat down to share ideas, select readings, and cull through old class notes. From those sources they developed a seven-week course to cover what they thought was important about managing at Restek, everything from analyzing problems to comparing leadership styles. They split the supervisors into small groups -- each taking the other's subordinates, so people could talk more freely -- and held a breakfast class once a week before work.

Silvis says his supervisors have become much more effective since the training began, freeing up top managers. And, if the Entrepreneur of the Year winners are at all typical, more successful growth companies are trying this type of homegrown training. The degree of sophistication naturally varies with the size of the company: at Best Buy Co., a $930-million electronics retailer based in Minneapolis, salespeople must take computerized tests twice a month to show they have mastered the product knowledge required of them.

But no matter how elaborate or informal the training program, what's striking is that these companies are all fashioning training programs in-house to suit their own needs. Moreover, none of them view training as a luxury for small entrepreneurial companies. Instead, it's seen as a necessity to build the kind of work force they need. Silvis, for example, when asked why his fast-growing company puts all new employees through 16 weekly classes about their new company, seems puzzled. How can you grow fast unless people understand what the company does? he wonders. And he is quite confident of the results: "Training pays for itself many, many times."

Cookout
Ruth Fertel, who was divorced, had two sons approaching college age, and earned $400 a month as a lab technician, knew it was time to make a change. So she mortgaged her house to buy a steak house. Four months later a hurricane knocked out her electricity, and rather than watching $3,000 worth of meat rot, Fertel threw a massive barbecue for the storm's victims. "I just hate waste," she says. The impulse proved to be more than charitable: "I had a big spurt in my business after the hurricane," says the owner of Ruth U. Fertel Inc., now a 32-store, $70-million restaurant chain called Ruth's Chris Steak House, headquartered in New Orleans.

Happy Ending
In 1967 Palmer "Pam" Reynolds landed a job as a bank secretary. At the time, she was 27, the mother of three daughters under 5, divorced, and on welfare. "I tell it loudly and proudly," she says of being on the dole, "because it enabled me to get on my own." In 1983 she was looking for work again, but this time she had 13 years of experience at a St. Louis textile company under her belt and had risen to become vice-president of sales and marketing. In the course of looking for a new job, it dawned on Reynolds: Why not start my own company? She found an angel who put up $250,000, and "literally on a handshake" Phoenix Textile Corp., in St. Louis, a $32-million company in 1991, was born.

Low Tech Goes High Tech
You wouldn't think of maternity clothing as a high-tech business -- unless you've talked to Rebecca Matthias. Matthias, 39, is founder and president of Mothers Work Inc., a Philadelphia-based retailer of upscale maternity clothing. After experimenting unsuccessfully with a mail-order catalog of maternity clothes for career women, she switched to retailing, with much better results. In 1991 her 53-store chain had sales of $14 million and had grown 76% in the previous two years.

Matthias's mail-order experiment taught her to think about retailing in a nontraditional way. She realized that a freestanding maternity store had to be small to justify its low traffic -- but it needed a wide selection because mothers-to-be make a lot of purchases at once. So Matthias's stores stock only one of each size of all but the best-selling items, saving space. Then Matthias uses a software package designed for mail-order businesses to track daily store sales by item -- and sends replacement inventory via UPS.

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