* * *
By the Numbers
Paul Goldin is living proof that it pays to study the odds. A Drexel University professor of statistics and finance for nearly 30 years, Goldin decided to apply his academic expertise to his hobby: baseball cards. After studying the changes taking place in the industry in the early 1980s, Goldin started the Score Board Inc. in 1986 and raised $2.7 million in July 1987 through a penny-stock offering. Today the Cherry Hill, N.J., company, at $59 million in revenues, is the country's largest distributor of sports and entertainment memorabilia. "We've now graduated to Morgan Stanley," says Goldin. "A private placement this past August raised $7.5 million." -- Alessandra Bianchi
* * *
A Personal Search
Catherine "Kye" Anderson traces her origins as an entrepreneur to a personal tragedy -- and the abiding passion that grew out of it.
It took 10 years in business before Anderson ever consciously made the link between her company, $15-million Medical Graphics Corp., a St. Paul, Minn., maker of heart and lung diagnostic equipment, and her father's death. When Anderson was 13, her father suffered a massive coronary. Just days before he died, doctors had insisted his shortness of breath was unrelated to his heart. "I remember sitting on the radiator by his bed and a doctor coming by to read an EKG machine. The picture of that doctor trying to make sense of a squiggly line and not knowing what was wrong haunted me for years."
It was what drove Anderson to become a medical technologist and, while working in the cardiopulmonary lab at the University of Minnesota, to pursue her quest to improve lung-function testing. A self-taught programmer, she developed software to translate diagnostic measurements into easily read computer graphics. "I developed this technology to give doctors the tools that could have saved my father's life," she says.
"Many entrepreneurs are driven by some experience they keep buried deep down," says Anderson. "But it's important to recognize it and share it. It gives you a clarity of vision."
* * *
Employee Owners
The stockholder wasn't satisfied. After listening to management's progress report at the shareholders' meeting, she pressed for an answer addressing her real concern: her dividend. "Why are we not making more money than we made last year?" she wanted to know.
That scene -- or a similar one -- is played out in corporations across America, month in and month out. But this time the location wasn't IBM or Ford. Instead, it was a plain-looking room several floors above a busy street in the Bronx. And the shareholder was one of the employee owners of Cooperative Home Care Associates, a radical experiment melding business and social goals. At this fast-growing, profitable company, a committed management team has demonstrated that employee ownership can work in an area most often thought of as a symbol of capitalism's failures: the South Bronx. Many of the women at the shareholders' meeting were former welfare recipients; in total, 75% of the company's 270 employees have spent time on public assistance. Yet for all the differences between this room and most corporate boardrooms, it was the similarities that were most striking. The women are serious about their business and earnestly debated the direction it should take.
That was what Rick Surpin had hoped for when he and a team of managers founded Cooperative Home Care, back in 1985. He had been hired as director of an economic-development agency and decided that the best kind of economic development he could do was to create jobs. His research showed that home health care was a growing field with lots of entry-level jobs, but the pay and benefits were poor. By creating a worker-owned cooperative, Surpin reasoned, he could pay the workers slightly better because they, rather than a third-party owner, would be receiving the operation's profits. Today Cooperative Home Care has grown to $3.5 million in sales and is helping form similar companies in other cities.
* * *
A Rich Diet
At age 32, and 220 pounds, Doug Foreman heeded his doctor's warning that unless he changed his eating habits, he was headed down the same road to a triple bypass that his father had traveled. "I could get away with substitutes for everything except chips and salsa," he recalls of his new meal planning. So with some tinkering in the kitchen, he came up with a baked -- rather than fried -- tortilla chip, and knocked on the back door of a neighborhood whole-foods store. Three years later finds Foreman 40 pounds lighter and running Guiltless Gourmet, his healthful-snack-food company based in Austin, Tex., which had 1991 sales of $2.5 million.
* * *
New-Product Rollouts
Only the most savvy entrepreneurs manage to sustain a growth company long after that first white-hot product burns out. Count among them Michael Lerner of Safety 1st, in Chestnut Hill, Mass., who parlayed a single novelty in the early 1980s into a business that boasts a 150-product line today.
