Getting inside the head of quintessential woman entrepreneur Sally Crawford is akin to discovering a new world.
It’s disorienting at first, so disorienting that the Crawford mindscape should be declared off limits to ordinary people. All signs point toward achievement. Perfection is mandated. And compete to win is the law of the land.
“I feel my mission in life is to raise the high bar for people,” said Crawford, 39, president of Crawford and Associates Inc., Rosemont, the computer training business she founded in 1982. Area clients include United Airlines, Elk Grove Village; The NutraSweet Company, Mt. Prospect; Harris Bank, Roselle, and a slate of international corporations including Apple Computer and Manpower International. CAI employs 40 and reports an annual revenue of $3 million. “I’m great at making things happen,” Crawford said. “I take charge. I go for what I want.”
“When I wake up in the morning, the one thing I know for sure is that Sally will be in high gear,” said Michael Broccolino of Elk Grove Village, chief financial officer at CAI.
Her success has brought Crawford national recognition and an armful of prestigious awards. She was named Illinois Woman Entrepreneur of the Year in 1989 by Inc. magazine, one of the Top 40 Under 40 entrepreneurs in the country by Entrepreneur magazine in 1991, and one of the Ten Most Outstanding Citizens by the Chicago Jaycees in 1992.
“Sally enjoys the acclaim and recognition even more than the money and the trappings of power,” said her fraternal twin sister, Sue Moore, who described herself as a worker bee. She has worked for CAI for the last seven years, doing jobs ranging from stuffing envelopes to making sales calls. Her current job is technical writer. “I’m very happy where I am. I try to maintain a low profile,” she said.
Ironically, it was Moore’s superior 3rd-grade report card that sent her super-achiever sister into overdrive. The incident was so traumatic for Crawford, she said, that “just thinking about that day feels like I’m having an out-of-body experience.
“I’m 8 years old and I’m sitting in the back yard. Sue and I were in the 3rd grade, and we had just gotten our report cards. Sue got four As and I got two As and two Cs. I didn’t want Cs! I was devastated. I just didn’t want to be second best.”
Then there was the time she chucked her violin after 10 years of fiddling around with lessons and practice. “I even played in Europe on a high school orchestra tour,” she said. “When I figured out that I was going to be a good violinist but I would never be a great one, I dropped it.”
What happens to a child who can’t abide the second chair in the orchestra, who believes that being runner-up is the same as failing?
If the child is Sally Crawford, she grows up to portray the strong woman to Oscar perfection. “I got tired of always being the strong one, the strong woman, but I just couldn’t stop,” said Crawford.
In 1982, at the age of 28, Crawford quit her job at Xerox Corp., Chicago, where she was promoted five times in four years. “I was tired of office politics,” she said. She became an entrepreneur by default.
When she was asked during her Xerox exit interview what she was going to do next, she didn’t want to say she had no idea-which was the truth-“so I just said, `I’m going to start my own business.’ “
When several of Crawford’s former Xerox clients called her at home to find out how they could continue working with her, the idea of opening her own computer training business began to make sense.
The next step was finding someone to grubstake the venture. “The toughest sale I ever made,” said Crawford, was persuading her father, John Gogots, to lend her $20,000 to start the business.
“I said, `Sally you’re not going to make it. You’re bucking Xerox and you’re bucking IBM,’ ” related Gogots, who owned a truck repair business in Chicago before he retired in 1975. “I didn’t expect to be paid back, and if she hadn’t paid it back, that would have been all right.” She paid the loan back in three years.
Despite her father’s initial caution, Crawford said she never doubted his confidence in her and his unconditional love for her. “My Dad is the perfect parent for me; he’s my role model,” said Crawford. (Her mother, Helen, died four years ago.) “He’s the kind of person who always sees the glass half-full. I don’t think he realizes how much of an influence he’s had on me.”
Crawford spent the next three years working out of the basement of her home. She was determined to prove to the world that a five-foot, one-half- inch woman could be a heavyweight contender in an industry dominated by international computer corporations.
“Sometimes it’s easier for a woman to get her foot in the door, but then she has two minutes to say something intelligent,” said Crawford.
It didn’t matter that she had to put in 60- to 80-hour workweeks to beat the big boys at their own game. The price of having it all was giving all she had, and she paid the piper without complaint.
(There is a sign on her secretary’s desk that has a circle drawn around the word “whine” with a slash through it, similar to the no-smoking signs displayed in public places. The message is no whining allowed. “I really love that sign,” said Crawford.)
“Sally comes on like a locomotive. She pulls people along with her,” said Beth Kljajic, president of the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Woman Business Owners (NAWBO). Crawford is the group’s vice president of corporate relations and a member of the board of directors.
“Sally is successful, but at her own personal expense,” Kljajic said. “Sally wants everybody to like her. She wants to be everybody’s friend. It’s like she’s running a popularity contest. She’s not the most successful business owner I know. If being liked is one of your goals, sometimes you have to go the nice way. She’s too nice. I’ll trample over people in a second, but Sally won’t do that.”
Four months before her 40th birthday, Crawford is planning her next conquest, her toughest yet. Herself. It’s time for change. Success has fallen short of fulfillment.
“I’ve channeled everything into my business,” said Crawford. “About a year ago, I thought, gee, I might really enjoy a personal life.”
And she has new ambitions: “What I rally want to do is be a writer and a speaker. I would like to be respected internationally for writing and speaking.”
Her game plan includes shifting day-to-day management chores to Broccolino, taking courses to promote “my personal and professional growth” and moving CAI to the next level of maturity, “into a strong, stable company, not just a woman entrepreneur’s business,” said Crawford. “If companies like Crawford are really going to make a difference, then they have to go beyond the nine-to-five training experience. . . . We’re still only working with a little piece of the (consulting) puzzle.”
CAI plans to expand its services to include pre-training planning and post-training evaluation of client education programs.
Crawford expects her role at CAI to change over the next five years. She wants “to have a big-picture, visionary influence on the company.” In plain English that means the CAI staff “will probably see me less than they do now.”
Broccolino closed the accounting business he owned for eight years to come to work for Crawford in 1989. “Since day one, she has always let me call my own shots. She trusts me. I’ve never been made to feel like anything less than an equal partner. I joke with my friends about my situation. I tell them this is like a great second marriage.”
“He’s really my right-hand person,” said Crawford. “He’s been a great rock through all this. . . . He’s helped me step back. He’s helped me to let go.”
The transition from hands-on entrepreneur to international expert on the marriage of man and technology comes at a time when Crawford’s 13-year marriage is ending and her scheduled date for open-heart surgery is imminent. On March 1, Crawford will undergo an operation to correct a congenital septal defect, a hole in an inner wall of her heart, which allows unoxygenated blood to bypass the lungs and be recirculated.
“I’d planned to take March off anyway for a vacation, so now I’m just going to have my heart surgery,” Crawford said.
Given her desire to wean the company away from her direct supervision, the operation couldn’t come at a more opportune time, she said. “If I give our staff a project, and I sense that they’re overwhelmed with it, I have a tendency to want to rescue them. In that sense surgery is good, because if I’d been gone on vacation in March, I would have been torn” between trying to relax and worrying about CAI. “But on March 1, I’m going to be out of commission for awhile. I’m going to be on a heart-lung machine, and I cannot be getting faxes.”
Is the thought of having open heart surgery scary?
“No, scary was making the payroll in ’91, during the recession,” she said rolling her eyes. The fear threatened to take up permanent residence in the pit of her stomach. “I call it bowling ball syndrome. It’s when you’re up to your eyeballs in debt and you feel like you’ve swallowed a bowling ball. . . . The biggest mistake we made was growing too big too fast.” The CAI staff grew from seven in 1988 to 40 in 1991.
Because Crawford believes that doing less than two things at once is an extravagant waste of time, she has adopted multi-tasking as her personal work style. Multi-tasking, in computer jargon, means doing several tasks simultaneously.
While Crawford gets her hair done, she pounds away at her portable lap-top computer. While she goes for the burn on her stair-climbing exercise machine, she catches up on her reading. When she travels from her office to her Lincoln Park apartment, she hauls two big tote bags and a briefcase full of business papers and mail. “I don’t open the mail at the office; I can do that at home,” she said.
Downtime is an alien concept to Crawford. Relaxation is something to do in tiny snatches while you’re working. At home, she puts on flannel pajamas, dines either on Cheerios straight from the box or on popcorn (her favorite super-fast foods) with a glass of wine, and works until the wee hours of the morning. Often she treats herself to a frozen yogurt cone. “I worked till 4:30 this morning so I had two cones,” she confessed.
“I don’t have a normal 24-hour day. If I have to communicate information to a customer and we’ve played phone tag all day, I can call and leave a message on that person’s voice mail or send a fax in the middle of the night. It’s so fast. At NAWBO, they call me the fax goddess.”
Crawford doesn’t let a little thing like driving get in the way of productivity either. As she tools down the highway in her maroon Mercedes-Benz sports car, cocooned in her full-length mink coat, she routinely revises her business calendar and returns calls on her car phone. She wanted to install a mobile facsimile machine but was overruled by Broccolino who envisioned a fax-focused Crawford driving off the road.
Crawford attributes her success to CAI’s customer-first business philosophy, something to which most large corporations pay lip service but rarely do, she said. “At CAI, the client is the No. 1 priority and, in fact, is our only reason for being in business. (Customer service) is about returning phone calls. It’s constantly keeping the customer in the loop. If you say you’re going to do something on Tuesday, you do it. And if, for some reason, there’s an act of God and you can’t, then you pick up the phone and let the customer know.”
“We always feel like we’re her most important customer,” said Leslie Muir, vice president of training and staff development at Harris Bank, Chicago.
CAI views its consulting role as client partner. Instead of boring lectures, the company offers scenario-based training by simulating on-the-job problems and walking clients through solutions, using computer technology as a tool. “We don’t want you to memorize what can be done,” says a CAI ad. “We want you to realize what can be done.”
“You tell Sally what you need and she pulls it all together,” said Diane Malsom, a training manager for United Airlines. “We asked Sally to show our staff of instructors who are very skilled in computer technology how to step out of their high-tech boxes and tap into the creativity of their students. She taught them how to stretch their limits and look for new ways to solve problems.”
“She’s more expensive than most (trainers) and well worth it,” said Tim Steele, senior consultant for microcomputers at Baxter Healthcare Corp. near Waukegan. “When I think of Sally Crawford two things come to mind: professionalism and incredible follow-through. When I ask her for information, I don’t have to go back and ask a second time.”
“It’s a simple price and performance issue. With Crawford the price is right and the performance is excellent,” said Bill Hoffmann, a research and development analyst at The NutraSweet Company. “Our staff is highly educated and they don’t like to waste time. If they don’t understand something, they ask a question and they expect a complete answer.”
The secret to winning customer loyalty is integrity, said Crawford: “I believe in doing what’s right, not what’s convenient or tax-deductible or profitable. In my heart I know what’s right, and I listen to that.”
“She often recommends things I haven’t considered,” said Steele. Sometimes she will suggest a course of action “that cuts her out of the deal altogether because she thinks another (vendor’s) product is what our business needs. It’s times like that that remind me she’s in this for the long haul. Five years from now, most of my other vendors will have come and gone, but we’ll still be working with Sally. I’m betting my training program on it.”
“We’re part of the Crawford cult,” said Laurie Nupnau, assistant vice president of information technology at Heller Financial Inc., Chicago, who has worked with Crawford for eight years. “Sally delivers quality training, but her added value is involvement. Most vendors typically come in, and say, `Here’s our training package, does it fit? No. Okay, have a nice day.’ When you work with Sally, you get as excited as she does about a project.”
“Instead of taking a boiler plate approach to training, she will adapt a program to meet our specific needs,” said Joanne Stachura, vice president of human resources, Continental Bank, Chicago.
A potential competitor has decided if you can’t beat ’em, collaborate. Rather than go head to head with CAI, Lante Corporation, Chicago, a microcomputer software consulting firm, often brings CAI into Lante projects as co-consultant.
“We know what we’re going to get, and what we get is always good,” said Jeff Weinberg, Lante business development manager. Last year, Weinberg referred CAI to six clients who each paid training fees to CAI ranging from $10,000 to $15,000. The informal partnership has been so successful that a Lante buyout of CAI has been considered, said Weinberg, though no offer has been made to Crawford.
“I’m never closed to new opportunities,” said Crawford when told of Weinberg’s comments.
Entrepreneurs who want their businesses to turn in superstar performances need a strong supporting cast of employees. “I have surrounded myself with excellent people and empowered them for greatness by leaving them alone,” said Crawford. “I share with them my principles and values, and then I focus on results, not on the process.”
“Sally’s organization is extremely reliable,” said Mike Adell, national sales manager for Apple Computer who for seven years has used CAI to train Apple retailers. “Her imprint is quite apparent in the work they do for us.”
“I’m committed to being a mentor, a teacher,” said Crawford. “I wasn’t like that 10 years ago, but back then I was working 80 hours a week.”
“When I interviewed with Sally (for the job of secretary), I told her I didn’t go to college. She said, `I don’t care about that, it doesn’t matter,’ ” said Barb Ratkowski of Bartlett, who was Crawford’s secretary for four years before she was promoted to sell CAI services as business development executive. “I never felt I was working for Sally. I always felt I was working with her, that we were partners. I never felt inferior to her in any way, even though she was president of the company.”
Of the 40 employees at CAI, only five are male. “Women are attracted to this company because they know they’ll get a fair deal even though they’re women,” said Crawford.
“My former male boss told me, `You can’t ride the fence. You either go for your career or stay at home with your family,’ ” related Sue Drake of Barrington, manager of computer-based training, who joined CAI seven years ago. “Four months later I went to work for Sally. Sally let me do both.”
Crawford was unable to accord herself the same privilege.
“When she started out with a new business, we both said, Oh wow, this is great,” recalled Bob Crawford, 53, Sally’s husband. They have been separated for a year and plan to divorce soon. Bob has been a customer service specialist at Xerox since 1966. “We said we wouldn’t let this affect us, but things started to happen.
“She felt like the weight of the world was on her shoulders,” he said. “The differences between us began to magnify. Actually I’ve come to hate the business because of that. I know I still love her though.” Given the choice, Bob would remain married to Sally. “I’ll never ever find someone else like Sally.”
Crawford has ruled out remarriage and motherhood. “I think sometimes marriage wrecks things,” she said. “In terms of being with a partner, I don’t think there has to be a marriage. I think it’s okay to have a special relationship with someone, and not necessarily live together.
“I will not have children. It’s totally by choice; it has been for a long time. When I do things I want to do them well and give them my utmost. Nurturing this business-not just the business, not just the bottom line but nurturing these people-that’s my job. I don’t know that I could do both well.”
Her independence “is vitally important,” she said. “It’s part of what I need, like vitamins or Stairmaster, and I need those everyday.”
For now, taking care of business still consumes most of her time. “I had an opportunity to be on the Clinton transition team,” she said. Clinton’s staff asked NAWBO to supply the resumes of board members who were willing to participate. “I elected not to throw my hat in the ring. I had a good chance (of being selected), but the reason I didn’t go was because I needed to concentrate on my business. I really think discipline is one of my strengths.”
The best time of her life “is right now,” she said. “I feel that I’m making a difference in the world.”
Several days after an interview, a reporter received a fax from Crawford: ” . . . when we were discussing twins and being competitive and wanting to be the best, I thought of an analogy. If I were able to chose, I’d want to be Bill, not Hillary. Does that make sense?”
Perfect sense.
