Right out of school, Stiles went to work for Litton Industries as the company's first woman programmer. She hopped to Xerox, then to General Electric's Consulting Services division, or G-Con. She worked there from 1983 to 1989, first as a consultant and then as a technical director, managing consultants. At one point during those years, Stiles left for a competitor who had offered her a sales and marketing position, something G-Con had refused her. G-Con lured her back with a similar position, but the sclerotic corporate culture frustrated her -- "It took days to make decisions" -- and she felt stymied in her career. "There was no room at the top for mavericks. You were supposed to do what you were told and make your numbers."
So a year after she'd returned to G-Con, Stiles set out on her own, taking several clients with her. Although she had signed a noncompete agreement when she'd first gone to G-Con, she refused it when she returned. She did have to sign a nondisclosure agreement, promising not to take any tangible information -- files, résumés, databases. "But I had all the client information in my head," Stiles says. She hired five consultants in her first two months, just to serve her old clients, and G-Con sent a legalistic letter, hoping to spook her. "It just remotivated me," she says.
Stiles learned a lot of positive lessons at G-Con. When she'd returned to take the sales and marketing position, the company had put her through more than a month of intensive training in strategic selling -- how to identify decision makers in a client company, how to call them, how to analyze the account, and how to develop a marketing plan. She passes that knowledge on to her own salespeople. "I have to teach them that selling is more than getting an order. It's developing a relationship."
She learned negative lessons, too. In many ways Stiles's memories of G-Con provide a model of what her company won't be. She'll never get so caught up in the numbers game that she forgets the people. Because she was a consultant herself, Stiles says, "I know what it's like to sit in a city 200 miles away from headquarters, and no one calls you." She keeps in touch with her workers by hosting lunches and deep-sea-fishing trips, and by treating each consultant's problem as her own biggest problem. "Customers always hear about problems first -- if the consultants don't think we're paying enough or answering their questions fast enough, they'll tell the customers, and the customers will tell us. When that happens, it's bad news."
And she'll never get so caught up in the numbers game that she'll pass up business. G-Con, she says, always quoted the standard markup on a consultant's services. She's more flexible. OCS will accept a slimmer margin to start a promising relationship. Of course, Stiles's clients are mostly Fortune 100 companies, so there is some room to maneuver. Nor will she seek false economies. "There were a lot of cash constraints at GE," she recalls. "I didn't have a fax machine there because our office was trying to save money. Now I'll invest money where I think it's going to bring a return."
All in all, it was quite an education. Did it have to take so long? Stiles admits she probably should have gone her own way after leaving GE the first time, instead of returning for another year. "Someone approached me then -- a prospective partner -- but I wasn't ready." Could she have learned all those lessons at her own company, the school of hard knocks? "It would have taken longer," she says. "I can see problems coming, I can put out fires before they start." Five years, 40 employees, and $2.4 million into her dream, one of Stiles's biggest clients is GE itself; the consulting division that served as her classroom was sold nearly two years ago. -- Michael P. Cronin
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5. What If Somebody Steals Your Idea?
American Harvest (#150) sold a respectable $72 million worth of food dehydrators, high-speed baking ovens, and accessories last year. But in 1975 the company, then known as Alternative Pioneering Systems, was just a glimmer in the eyes of founders David Dornbush and Chad Erickson, and they were worried that someone might knock off their idea to mass merchandise food dehydrators. "We took the blind leap," says Erickson, who also took plenty of precautions when rolling out the idea.
No wonder. They themselves had knocked off their food-dehydrator design from a manufacturer who had been touting the virtues of his gadget on a local afternoon talk show that Dornbush, a very bored business-school graduate student at the time, had watched.
But it wasn't even the ease with which the machine could be duplicated that scared the two founders most. The linchpin of their business plan was to mass market the obscure gadget, found in survivalist stores. And as anyone in a service business knows, protecting a potentially lucrative marketing concept requires shrewd talking.
"We wanted to sell food dehydrators to mainstream American home gardeners interested in preserving their fruits and vegetables," says Erickson. And that's the type of idea people with money and contacts would have loved to call their own and make happen. "We were pretty paranoid about everybody," he confesses.
Dornbush and Erickson figured that the best way to protect their idea was to first build a prototype that would outperform the existing competition, which they did, with the help of a trusted friend who was studying aerospace engineering. "We got into the patent business right away," says Erickson.
