RiSky bUSiNESS CONTiNUES
work to differently,” she says.
The idea that that companies are looking for STEM gradu- ates, despite the recession, is good news for the peers of Nikeya Peay, Ales-cia Malone, and Antoinette Anderson. The trio are pursuing graduate degrees in computer engineering at Jackson State University, and all have had internships that make their resumes sparkle.
Peay, 24, who is from Baltimore, says that her degree of- fers her multiple options. Expertise in computer hardware with embedded circuits and systems lends itself to aerospace and defense companies, and she has interned at sports and clothing retailer Nike’s world headquarters. Fortune 500 giants like Nike need employees that can keep their compu- ter systems humming. Eventually though, Peay says, after working for several years, she plans to become a professor
of engineering and pass on what she has learned.
Also in Minnesota, the On-Demand Group (ODG) is a in- formation technology services company. Heather Manley, 33, and her brother, Sean, bought the 15-year-old firm from her father in 2008. The company, whose business is 80 percent public and 20 percent private, provides organ- izations with IT staffers of every capacity and expertise.
Manley says her strength is that ODG is not tied to a specific industry. With an in-house database of 80,000 resumes for mid-to senior-level consultants, On-Demand projects revenues of $4 million this year, and she says that the repository of contacts attracts clients who want to avoid job boards when they search for talent. On the retail front, ODG provides a program manager, through its partnership with Best Buy, headquartered in Minneso- ta, to manage several initiatives in the mobile application division.
Such flexibility is crucial. “In 2009, we experienced a few losses as some clients cut back on using our services, but we were able to remain flat, with $2 million in sales, rather than suffering a loss. I know many other IT compa-
14 WOMENOFCOLOR | FALL 2010
Recently, the CEO of the $5 million Houston company be- gan a relationship with a new client: Wal-Mart. But unlike many contemporaries that rely on email and the phone to drum up business, Clayton got the name of a procure- ment executive and went down to Bentonville, Arkansas to meet him.
There are more than 60,000 Wal-Mart vendors world- wide, she says, “and I wanted someone to know me and remember my company. We don’t have a contract yet, but we are starting to receive requisitions.”
These connections please Sharon Patterson, the co-found- er of the Billion Dollar Roundtable. It is a group of 17 Fortune 500 companies, including Wal-Mart, that spend at least $1 billion annually with minority- and women- owned suppliers of goods and service. Supplier diversity is important in corporate America and should be placed strategically within its core business and be driven by the executive team. Because, says Patterson, “Such coopera- tion will assist diverse business owners to build capacity, and to the extent that BDR can help that process it will.”
by Frank McCoy,
fmccoy@ccgmag.com www.womenofcolor.net
nies that were not so fortunate,” she says.
Other factors also hone On-Demand’s competitive- ness. These include networking with women’s and other groups, obtaining women-, minority-, and veteran- owned business certifications, and providing cost-free assessments of clients’ needs. The firm is also debt free. “This allows us to be transparent. We take competitive markups, and offer extremely fair prices. Only one com- pany asked us to reduce our rates last year, which we did. It is all about making sure the clients and our consultants are happy.”
The women whose companies sell goods and services to the nation’s biggest public and private concerns can relate to a remark made by the queen in Lewis Carroll’s classic, Through the Looking Glass. Her majesty tells Alice “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place...you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Sonia C. Clayton is an expert at combining modern skills with an old school approach to business. In 2001, she founded Virtual Intelligence Providers, LLC, an information technology, staffing, and engineering services vendor that specializes in ERP systems, with more than 70 Fortune 500 corporations as clients. A key to her success has been her company’s use of virtual con- nectivity to reduce costs for VIP and clients.
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