How can a woman run not one but two companies while raising five kids -- including a toddler and an infant? Like this.
If you're the CEO of a growing company and have a working spouse and a young family, then you're probably intimately familiar with a little place called the State of Perpetual Chaos. You enter this state when you realize it's July and no one is signed up for camp, or when the nanny quits, or when you and your spouse both schedule an out-of-town trip on the same night. Of course, Chaos may just be a layover. If you're not careful, you could well be on your way to an even less attractive destination called Total Anarchy. You wouldn't be the first.
But don't expect to find Ann Deters there, because at work and at home, she seems to have managed herself out of Perpetual Chaos. Don't hate her. Deters is the 44-year-old CEO of Vantage Technology, an Effingham, Ill., Inc 500 company that markets mobile cataract-surgery equipment; the founder of SevenD & Associates, a new chain of outpatient-surgery centers; the wife of Dennis, director of business development at Vantage; and the mother of Jeff (age 14), Neal (11), Scott (9), Alex (3), and Caroline (7 months). That's right -- two companies and five kids, four boys and a girl. With such a crew to manage, Deters knows that the devil is in the details, that it's generally not the big problems that drive you over the edge but the cumulative effect of all the small things that can go wrong. Company building has taught her that you need systems to keep life running smoothly. So she's put them in place, and over time, through trial and error, she's made them work.
"I was always determined to be a hard-driven career woman," says Deters. In fact, she's a convincing case for a genetic predisposition toward entrepreneurship. Her grandfather founded a seed company in a small rural community in Illinois. Her father and uncles ultimately expanded it; then her father plowed some of the profits into an investment firm that provided venture capital for family members. Deters and her seven siblings even sat on boards when they were teenagers. When she was in her twenties, she moved to St. Louis, joined Price Waterhouse, and made two promises to herself: she wouldn't move back to her hometown, and she'd never marry a farmer. Ultimately, she did both. Her hometown sweetheart, Dennis, who worked on his family's hog and grain farm, won her over with persistence; her father, satisfied that she had proved her talent and potential outside the family business, offered her a job.
The early years of the Deterses' marriage and parenthood were typical for entrepreneurial families. When their first child was a newborn, Ann Deters took the nursing infant to the office with her every day for six weeks. When he was a toddler, she traveled to Chicago every weekend for an executive M.B.A. program at Northwestern. Neal, their second, was born during Northwestern's Christmas break, and Deters returned to work and school right after New Year's Day. "Dennis was the one who raised Neal as an infant," she concedes. By the time Scott was born, in 1993, Deters had taken the helm at J.M. Schultz Investment Co., the firm her father had founded, and was overseeing four companies, including Vantage. Dennis, having given up the agricultural life, was ensconced at Vantage, a start-up bankrolled by several family members, including Ann, who three years later would become its CEO. The couple seemed to be working nonstop. "I was on the road more and more," recalls Dennis. "Then I'd come home, and there would be peewee soccer or Little League. When it was time to relax, one of us was still running."
Maybe it was sheer exhaustion, or perhaps her own deeply ingrained midwestern family values coming home to roost, but Deters knew she had to make some changes. "I came to the realization that the most important thing in my life was children and family," she says, "and I started rethinking my priorities. We made a conscious effort to fit the business into our children's schedule instead of fitting our children into the business's schedule."
Has Vantage suffered because of that choice? "Having a business and a family gives me the discipline to create a more balanced life and makes me more of a whole person," she says. And that, she believes, makes her a better manager.
"When I'd had the boys, I said to myself that I was not going to raise them so they could go from their mother to their wives," Deters says.
At Vantage, Deters hired a management team, including an operations manager, a sales manager, and eventually a president. She began delegating responsibilities, such as customer service and personnel management, that she had previously insisted on handling herself. For his part, Dennis asked to be taken off the road and placed in an adjunct sales position, supporting and overseeing Vantage's reps (among other things). Typically, the couple work from 7:30 to 5:30, and one of them is usually on the road one night a week. As part of a pledge to their children, they travel together only once a year, to a four-day industry trade show.
Outside the office, Deters made a tough decision to resign from all community boards. "Why am I killing myself to help everybody but my children?" she asked herself. Finally, her evenings were free to spend with the people who needed her most.
The system Deters has today didn't just kick in overnight. It's been fine-tuned for the past eight years to accommodate each stage of the family's growth. With one teenager and two more boys on the cusp of adolescence, it's bound to keep changing. But what remains steady is the value system. Like a CEO imparting a company mission statement, Deters makes sure her kids understand the philosophy behind every rule and routine: work hard, make time for play, have faith, lead a balanced life.
At the heart of this working couple's family strategy is the right support system. Vantage, now a handsomely profitable $6-million company, has given the Deterses ample resources, and they spend $30,000 to $40,000 a year on child care and housecleaning. Their "house manager," Chelsea Miller, 20, arrives at 7:30 and leaves at 5:30, but she's typically in contact with the Deterses several times a day. Miller logs on to the Internet daily, where she has password access to Ann's and Dennis's schedules on Microsoft Outlook. "When Ann first explained it to me, I thought I'd be lost," recalls Miller, who is "Ms. Chelsea" to the boys. "But it's very easy to use. Now if she doesn't answer her cell phone, I can look at her calendar and find out where she is." Miller also adds the boys' activities to the calendar and enters tentative dates for, say, medical checkups, which Deters can either approve or change on her own.
Cell phones and E-mail are key to the system as well, and Deters makes it clear that she wants to hear from Miller not just about household scheduling but about behavioral issues as well. After a particularly tough day, for instance, Miller recently dashed off an E-mail to Deters, who was on an overnight trip. "Almost every time I have to tell [child's name withheld] 'no' to something, he feels as though it is the end of the world," wrote Miller. "Is it his age? Please help me with this." Deters wrote back the next morning: "Do not allow [him] to show that 'the world is against me' attitude or any flare of temper. He does this with both Dennis and me, and we constantly remind him that this is not proper behavior and it will get him nowhere." Soon after, Dennis also E-mailed Ann and copied Miller: "I treated the boys to a movie last night. We had a heart-to-heart on how they were treating Ms. Chelsea.... I informed the boys that they were to meet the expectations of Ms. Chelsea, since you and I with Chelsea agreed on standards and Ms. Chelsea does not pull this stuff out of the air. They said that they will try harder, but remember, they were all working to go to a movie last night."
