companies in the private sector and
state agencies.
Company: Corporate Image Interiors
Type of business: Interior space planning, furniture supplier for commercial
and residential applications.
Owner: Audrey E. Lochiatto
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
By Emilio DiSpirito IV License Partner | Engel & Völkers Oceanside Leader | The DiSpirito…
Learn More
Employees: 1
Location: Exeter
Annual sales: WND
Finding a way to do more with less is something that Audrey Lochiatto has made a career out of. It seems that in all aspects of her life, less is more.
Less glitzy credentials. Less walking a beaten path. Less financial and emotional support. Less willing to sacrifice time with her growing son. Less rest.
For Lochiatto, all of the above has added up to a successful career as an entrepreneur, all while raising a son as a single mother and volunteering considerable amounts of her time to various causes in her hometown of Exeter.
Corporate Image Interiors, Lochiatto’s one-woman, home-based business, sells ergonomic office furniture and provides interior space planning and minor interior office renovation. The business is known for helping clients with limited space and cash to do successful office makeovers.
Lochiatto paved a path to success as a business owner one small brick at a time. After graduating from the Katherine Gibbs School in 1973 at the age of 19, Lochiatto took a job in Boston as a secretary, eventually working her way up to a position as an office manager.
“My success in office product sales is directly related to my early experience in the office environment as a secretary. I personally could relate to their need for both comfort and efficiency at their desk,” she said.
In 1976, Lochiatto took a sales job representing a distributor of office furniture and supplies in Boston. She took the scary plunge into the world of salary via commission so that she could have more flexibility in her schedule in order to be there for her son.
“I was 22 years old, I wanted to be able to control my own hours so that I could be a mom and a business woman,” recalled Lochiatto.
She launched her own furniture supply business at home in 1991, thus beginning a learning process that proved a harder – and perhaps greater – education than the business administration degree she is still pursuing part-time at the University of Rhode Island. The first big lesson came when Lochiatto said she was never paid for more than 600 hours of work at a major educational institution, working for an architect who had a contract with the school – she didn’t have a contract, with either the school or the architect.
Then, reeling from the loss of wages and after three banks refused her first application for a small business loan, Lochiatto contacted Charles Newton, the administrator of Rhode Island’s Minority Business Enterprise Program. With Newton’s guidance she was able to secure a business line of credit, and status as a Woman Business Enterprise of the Minority Business Enterprise Program.
With her new official earmark as a firm with whom the state wants to do business and a growing understanding of how to run a business, Lochiatto began bidding on state contracts for design services. First she scored one big contract. Then another.
Today business is just fine, thank you. Now more than a decade after striking out on her own, Lochiatto estimates that half of her business is done with state agencies, municipalities and nonprofit organizations.
In the private sector, some of Corporate Image Interior’s clients include Roger Williams Law School, Halliwell Engineering Associates, American Power Conversion, J.L. Marshall & Sons, and the South County Internal Medicine Center.
Of her personal and professional odyssey, Lochiatto said: “It’s been – I’ve made a living. It’s been a slow growing process. Today I’ve got great credit, a good reputation and I’ve been around for 12 years. A client can call me with a broken chair with a warranty that ran out 12 years ago and I’ll fix it. I’ve been successful by doing problem solving, not product selling. I’m there for my clients.”
Outside of work, Lochiatto said she doggedly continues to pursue a bachelor’s business degree at the University of Rhode Island.
For many years Lochiatto steadily volunteered at her son Adam’s schools – when he reached his teens, Adam begged her to stop. You’re embarrassing me, mom! Of all the work she has done, paid and volunteer, Lochiatto said the time she spent in her son’s grammar school classes was the most rewarding
In the meanwhile, Corporate Image Interiors continues to grow, and Lochiatto said she hopes to open a storefront in the next year or so. The company recently acquired a presence on the Internet: www.thefurniturelady.com
When spoken to for this report, Lochiatto was running, penciling in an unexpected interview, running. One gets the sense that she’s always been running.
No matter. It has admittedly not always been easy, but Lochiatto gets it done.
“I don’t want to sound trite, but it’s been difficult. Many times, because
I was a woman, I wasn’t taken as seriously – I’ve won that respect finally.
I think being single also helped me win that respect. I basically did it on
my own. I got a lot of help from people like Charles Newton along the way –
they’ve been really great. But financially, spiritually and emotionally I did
it alone.”
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