A woman can be expected to put a tremendous amount of work into a business that she herself starts because it is a joy to do so and because failure simply is not an option, according to two women who played key roles in the recent 2008 Emerging Women in Business Conference.
“Seeds of Success” was the theme of the six-hour event, held June 12 at Rhode Island College, and it was a theme that keynote speaker Sandra Ruiz-Desai had no trouble incorporating into her speech to the 50 or so women in attendance at the William C. Gaige Hall auditorium.
“Do you look outside of yourself for riches? Do you accept whatever someone decides to give you? Or do you look inside yourself for the seeds of success?” Ruiz-Desai asked the audience. “If you want to grow the seeds of success, you have to plant them in your thoughts, where they will grow into your subconscious, and your thoughts will produce your actions, and your actions will produce your success.”
Ruiz-Desai is the owner and operator of Desai Communications in Connecticut, a multi-million-dollar marketing and graphics design business serving Fortune 500 companies nationwide. She and her husband, Bharat Desai, started the business in the basement of their home in 1979.
The two began a business to copy photographic slides, but the going was slow in the early years as Ruiz-Desai made innumerable cold calls seeking clients. “Failure was not an option,” she said. With persistence, commitment and “a burning desire to stay financially alive,” she said, she kept on plugging for many months until eventually she connected with a female executive at a nearby Fortune 500 company who became her mentor for 14 years and taught her a great deal about the graphic-images business.
Vanessa Crum can relate. She remembers what it was like during the two years after she and partner Cyndi McCarthy opened the Charlotte (pronounced char-lot-tay) jewelry store on the second level of Providence Place Mall in August of 2005. An attorney with the R.I. Department of Transportation by day, Crum would work nights at the jewelry store, while she and McCarthy split the weekend duties. “Yes, it was a lot,” she said. “But when it’s your own, it wasn’t like work. I wanted to be there. You want your business to succeed.”
Crum and Ruiz-Desai were members of a panel discussion at the June 12 conference featuring women who own and operate their own businesses.
Charlotte is part of a franchise with only three stores in the U.S. – Providence, Sante Fe and Nashville – that offer jewelry made by Ehinger-Schwarz, based in Ulm, Germany. All the jewelry is interchangeable.
Crum remains a DOT lawyer but McCarthy, who used to work with her at DOT, is now full-time manager of the jewelry store, and the two have added five part-time employees. The Center for Women & Enterprise in Providence helped the two draw up a successful business plan, Crum said, and financing came from a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan. Right now, due to the slowing economy, “the mall is quiet,” Crum said. “Our best customers are keeping us alive.” •
