She was broke, alone, and physically devastated--and then she picked up on a little-remarked federal requirement called Section 508. With that, Anna Bradley had both a calling and a pioneering business.
Entrepreneurs create businesses for many reasons, under various circumstances, responding to all manner of marketplace insights and opportunities. Many start small, under their own roof. But nobody's got a story anything like Anna Bradley's.
Once a well-paid corporate executive specializing in information technology, she had fallen on the hardest of times. At age 35, out of work and suffering from the physical and emotional ravages of a third major health crisis in less than a decade, she'd done the unthinkable: moved back in with her parents, to the 1,100-square-foot Iowa ranch house she grew up in.
There, holed up for months in the 8-by-10 bedroom of her childhood, she spotted a bright opportunity in a few gray lines of governmentese. In late 2000, Bradley read that the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (now known as the Access Board), a federal agency devoted to accessibility for the disabled, had issued final standards for some recent congressional amendments to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the landmark law that changed the American landscape by fostering wheelchair ramps, curb cuts, handicapped parking spaces, and wheelchair-accessible public restrooms at federal offices. The new initiative, Bradley noted, required federal agencies and companies doing business with the federal government to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.
That requirement, coupled with her determination to craft a second working life suited to her own disability, effectively sparked her business, which she named Criterion 508 Solutions, incorporating the number of the new section of the Rehabilitation Act. Bradley knew enough about government procurement contracts to feel the rumblings of a tectonic shift in commerce. The new regulations would go into effect soon, on June 21, 2001. Fortunes would be made by understanding and serving the soon-to-explode field of 508 compliance, the equivalent of building wheelchair ramps to technology.
"When God was handing out brains, common sense, and business acumen I was at the front of the line," says Bradley. "But when He was handing out good health, I must have been at a bar or a party somewhere because I certainly didn't get much."
Not quite true. Bradley enjoyed good health until she hit her mid-twenties. She excelled in the first female ice hockey league in Des Moines, then became a bantam-league hockey referee. Comfortable as an authority figure and rules enforcer, she hoped to follow her 1989 graduation from Iowa State University (where she majored in history) with a career in law enforcement. She made it through the Department of Public Safety boot camp, only to have the state patrol academy shuttered by budget cuts. While waiting for that situation to be resolved, Bradley took security work at a hospital and at one of Des Moines's biggest local employers, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a seed company now owned by DuPont. That led to a job in the Pioneer mailroom.
PCs were then just landing on desktops at Pioneer, befuddling many first-time users. Bradley purchased a computer for home and devoured the manual, eager to understand this new technological frontier. As she delivered mail on the floor at Pioneer, she started offering assistance to computer novices. Word quickly spread: "If you're having trouble with your PC, call the mail clerk in plant breeding."
One day, the call came from engineering. Bradley solved a print-driver problem in 15 minutes--and got offered the job of systems engineer. "Within a year of starting at Pioneer, literally in the mailroom," she says, "I was on the company private jet to Naples, Florida, doing a presentation to the board of directors on a computer-based training program I had developed."
But in 1992 Bradley's good fortune changed, soon after she gamely donned an inflatable sumo wrestler's suit for a bit of tomfoolery at a company picnic. Her spotter's attention wandered. Bradley fell over backwards, hitting her head on the concrete. "I saw stars for the first time in my life. I'd thought that was a figurative saying," she says. "But literally, all these white things clouded my field of vision." Bradley assumed the terrible headache that laid her up for more than a week would pass, but in fact her injury led to persistent headaches and chronic pain that radiated to her shoulders, back, and hips. Pain became a state of existence, something she learned to live with as she continued to work, to pursue a master's degree in adult education, training, and development, and to learn all she could about the next new thing to hit the hinterland, something called the Internet. She started moonlighting. She'd rent a hotel ballroom, place an ad in the paper, collect $75 a head from five dozen or six dozen attendees, and then speak about the wonders of the World Wide Web.
Word got around. The Principal Financial Group (NYSE:PFG), a Des Moines stalwart, lured her away in 1996 to help get the company's Internet and intranet operations up to speed. When she moved to another company it was for a six-figure salary; she lived, she says, "the high life." She traveled freely. Selected the Eddie Bauer edition when she purchased a Ford (NYSE:F) Explorer. But before the year was out, a new array of internal pain she'd endured for months was finally diagnosed as cancer. Bradley underwent a radical hysterectomy. Her change of life hit her like a speeding train. "I went through menopause in 48 hours," she says. "I felt like an addict coming off heroin. I used to walk around with a towel around my neck. I was dripping wet. It was like somebody turned a hose on me." Within a year, her hormone-crazed body piled on an additional 120 pounds. To dull the pain as she continued to work and pursue a Ph.D., Bradley popped Vicodin like breath mints. "You just get used to it," she says. "Personally, I don't consider myself disabled. That's my mindset. I've got problems, but everybody's got problems."
Her tale gets worse before it gets better. In 2000, while working for Florida Light & Power, Bradley contracted a bacterial infection, likely during a routine root canal. The infection settled around her heart, triggering a four-day episode of tachycardia. This third health strike really laid her low. Bedridden for months, unable to work, Bradley first depleted what little savings she had, then sold both the home she'd bought in Iowa and her second home in Stuart, Florida. "I went bust. I lost everything I'd ever worked for," she says. "At 35, moving back into my parents' home was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but I had no choice."
Now that she had touched bottom, she discovered that she had acquaintances, not friends. No one offered to take her in. So Bradley retreated, ailing and humiliated, to the confines of her former bedroom, a narrow, cell-like enclosure with a twin bed, a small desk, and a litter box for her cat--a most unusual business incubator indeed. Armed with a cell phone and a five-year-old HP (NYSE:HPQ) computer with a pokey 56k modem, she set about creating a business that would suit the life that now seemed hers, one of good days and bad days.
