Ann Drake did something three years ago that she “never, ever” expected to do: She joined her dad’s company, Dry Storage Corp., a Des Plaines-based logistics firm.
Nonetheless, today at age 45, the Park Ridge native has risen to the top of the corporate ladder as chief executive officer of the $130 million company her father, Jim McIlrath, founded in 1960, making it the fourth largest woman-owned firm in the Chicago area.
Her presence is being heralded in the male-dominated logistics industry, as well as winning her accolades in high-powered female entrepreneurial circles.
“She’s a wonderful role model and is very well respected in the industry,” says Elaine Winter, director of research for the Council of Logistics Management, an Oak Brook-based industry association whose 8,600 members are 90 percent male.
“She’s been very influential in making good changes at Dry Storage, giving the company more diversity and in training employees and expanding its national influence,” Winter adds.
Drake’s presence at the head of Dry Storage has also pushed the 1,750-employee company, which provides warehousing and transportation services to manufacturers, into an aggressive national expansion.
Just days after she arrived, the former interior designer and high school English teacher gutted the company’s office headquarters, installed glass walls and redecorated it in a style that, less than a decade ago, earned her praise among clients from Chicago’s Gold Coast, Hinsdale and the North Shore.
Drake’s personal style also is echoing itself in the Dry Storage boardroom. She didn’t waste any time in writing a reorganization plan, one that pushed Dry Storage into an aggressive East and West Coast expansion.
Just one year after she took over, the company is enjoying a revenue boom. Annual sales were up 18.2 percent in 1992 to $130 million from $110 the year before. Recently, Dry Storage was ranked the fourth largest woman-owned firm in the Chicago area by Crain’s Chicago Business, a ranking that was based on 1992 gross revenues.
Drake’s goal is to keep Dry Storage growing at least 15 percent annually for the next 10 years.
Major customers include Lever Brothers soap, Dow Brands, Eveready Battery Company, Nestle Beverage Company and Lipton Tea.
For almost 30 years, E.J. Brach Corp., the Chicago-based national distributor and manufacturer of candy, has had Dry Storage coordinate its national distribution and warehousing. Says Pat “P.J.” Doherty, manager of shipping and warehousing for Brach, “Ann has been instrumental in keeping Dry Storage at the forefront of the technology needed to distribute and warehouse products for businesses such as our own.”
“Of course, we were always very pleased with the work Jim did, and now we’re equally as satisfied with the operation run by Ann,” he adds. “It’s one company that always is a pleasure to do business with because you know they will get the job done.”
Dry Storage routes consumer products from the manufacturer to the retailer via a fleet of 650 trucks, with all of this being directed from the firm’s headquarters in an office building near Wolf and Oakton Roads in Des Plaines, as well as the adjacent 520,000-square-foot warehouse and its warehouse facilities in 10 other states.
At the Des Plaines warehouse, boxes are stacked from floor to ceiling, forklifts navigate the aisles, and computers track the products, which will be transported to retailers nationwide.
The logistics business, though, is more than just moving products around.
One Christmas, for example, Dry Storage worked with Revlon to prepare holiday packs of products to make them more appealing on the retail stand for customers. The company’s design team also works to help create aisle-end displays for the introduction of new products.
But most importantly, Drake, who lives in Chicago with her husband, John Drake II, and two grown stepdaughters, Joanna and Tracy, says she hopes her leadership role in a male-dominated environment will inspire other women to take on non-traditional jobs in industries such as logistics.
Drake is a board member and one of 350 female entrepreneurs from around the world who have been named to the prestigious Committee of 200, a Chicago-based international organization that honors women who have demonstrated entrepreneurial leadership and that also works to promote business skills in women. As a Committee of 200 board member, Drake is responsible for the organization’s annual conventions.
After hours, she also gives back by helping counsel other aspiring entrepreneurs through the Loyola University Family Business Forum.
“Ann is a dynamite business woman who engenders confidence and respect immediately,” says Jennet Lingle, president of First Team Inc., a Chicago-based international photo and film processing franchise and a former board member of the Committee of 200 who served on the committee that selected Drake for membership on the committee. “She’s also been very influential in helping other female entrepreneurs. She’s a very busy woman, but she is always willing to share her experiences and expertise with others either through our organization or Loyola.”
Drake is working to found an offshoot of the Council of Logistics Management called “The Women in Logistics Council.”
Winter says her presence and that of other influential women has helped increase the numbers to 10 percent of the organization, double what it was just three years ago.
“Twelve years ago, when I first started going to industry meetings I’d be one of about 12 women,” says Drake. “Now, it’s great. There’s usually at least 100.”
Ann Drake has come a long way from her childhood growing up in the ’50s and ’60’s in Park Ridge. Indeed, those years hardly seemed the best of times for dads to talk about and encourage their daughters to some day take over the family business.
The McIlrath household was no exception.
Dad ran the business then located as she remembers “somewhere in an old building” on the South Side of Chicago. Mom, Mary Lou, was a busy community volunteer and mother to her only child.
Ann’s life, meanwhile, revolved around childhood activities that included after-school get-togethers with her best girlfriend, carpooling together to ballet lessons and making splendid childhood memories at summer camp in Michigan.
High school at Maine South brought a progression to the pompon squad and a seat on the class council.
Like many offspring of family business owners, she worked in the company’s offices summers during high school. Once in a while she remembers discussions of labor unions and other business matters at the family dinner table, but it never occurred to her to major in business.
College followed, with a degree in English from the University of Iowa in 1969, which, she is quick to interject, “was a good women’s career choice at the time.”
At 21, she married her high school sweetheart. After eight years teaching English at Hinsdale Central High School, she left teaching to study interior design.
Looking for a new direction in her life, she underwent a series of career assessment tests only to discover “I’d tested way off the charts for activity level,” says Drake. “Being the only child of an entrepreneur, I must have picked up some of that hard-driving assertiveness.”
In 1979, while still in interior design school at the College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn, she launched her own firm, Camwilde Interiors in Hinsdale, which she continued to operate until she joined Dry Storage in 1990.
Business started booming.
But at the same time, and now in her early 30s, her personal life was being shaken by a “very unexpected divorce that forced me to re-evaluate everything I wanted to do in life.”
She says though she was being bitten by the entrepreneural bug, “it still never crossed my mind that I would someday be involved in my dad’s company. It was a man’s business-trucks, warehouses, all that dirt. Women were either dental hygienists or teachers. That’s why I became an English teacher, because I couldn’t see myself cleaning teeth. And later, when I thought of owning my own business, interior design was a women’s business too.”
Still, she says those experiences helped prepare her for a career in the fast-changing logistics industry.
“The English background really was all about gaining communication skills,” says Drake. “But it wasn’t until much later that I realized that people skills are really what business is all about. And being an entrepreneur taught me about assertiveness and guts in a big way.”
A major turning point for Drake started in 1982, when her father asked her to accompany him to annual meetings of the American Warehousing Association. (She’s been to every convention since, except for two.)
There, she got her first glimpse from other industry members of what second-generation involvment in a family business is all about. It piqued her interest, but still not enough to shed her own now thriving career in interior design.
In 1983, while she was running her own interior design firm, her dad appointed her to the company’s board of directors. She also entered Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management.
Still, she remembers him insisting “no strings attached.” “He just wanted me to know a little more about a firm that I would one day share ownership in,” says Drake.
Indeed, Dry Storage has never relied on outside investments to fuel the firm. Ownership is divided three ways-between her father, Drake and her mother, Mary Lou McIlrath.
As a board member, she gradually became more and more involved in the business. Finally, in 1990, she decided to dive in head-first. She’s never looked back.
About his daughter’s role in the business, McIlrath says: “It’s terribly difficult for a family business owner to appraise a close relative. When they come into a company, you kind of cross your fingers, cheer them on and hope you made the right choice. Since Ann’s been here, I’ve seen her leadership set the pace for the company. One of her greatest skills as a leader is that she is extremely likeable and people like to work for her. That is 90 percent of the success formula for running a business. She’s got it.”
Says Marilee Tatalias,vice president of real estate and engineering for Dry Storage, who has worked closely with both Ann and her father: “Ann’s a very strategic thinker. And that’s not to say that her father isn’t. But she’s come on board at a time when the industry is changing rapidly.
“The consumer goods manufacturers are no longer looking to us for just warehousing and distribution,” she adds. “Ann has been instrumental in getting us also involved in creating custom displays for our customers and getting their goods to move faster and minimize errors by computerizing inventories.”
Not suprisingly, Drake’s best ballerina buddy from childhood also hasn’t fared too bad either: She’s First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
If Drake’s eight trips to the White House so far this year are any indication of the ties that bind, theirs is a friendship that has weathered the test of time, distance and evolving personal and professional lives.
“Hillary has been such a front-runner for women,” Drake says. “It’s really exciting to watch her. I hope that through the Committee of 200, we can spread what she is doing in the White House.”
