Chasing a dream

A fastener to hide bra straps. A clearinghouse for independent truckers. A Web site for lost-and-founds. These are the ideas of three bay area residents who have given up their day jobs to start their own businesses despite the long odds against them.

By SCOTT BARANCIK

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 19, 2001

You have to be a little crazy to start your own business.

It takes plenty of cash and time. And even when the ideas are brilliant, the odds are tough. Most new businesses fail.

[Times photo: Dirk Shadd] Cindy Griffith sports a Bra Hide clip, which she invented to keep bra straps hidden.

And that's when the economy is booming. Now it's even tougher because the economy has cooled, making consumers and lenders cautious about parting with their money.

Despite the obstacles, though, millions of people still want to give up their day jobs to follow their dreams.

To find out what drives them, the St. Petersburg Times spent time with some of these budding entrepreneurs after contacting dozens of local people who registered new businesses during the first week of January.

One is a manufactured-home saleswoman who quit her job to start a nationwide lost-and-found site on the Internet.

Another is a failed insurance salesman who's risking the wrath of Teamsters by finding work for independent truckers.

The third is a fired corporate executive who raided her family's retirement accounts to finance her invention, a bra-strap hider.

Their tales help explain why some sacrifice their savings and leisure time to start a business. As long as there are crummy jobs, cruel bosses, inspired ideas and dreams of independence, there will be people willing to assume the risks.

Patti Lee, 48

Public Lost & Found Corp.

Amount invested: $30,000

Dozens of dot-coms melted last year when Wall Street abandoned hype for profits. But Patti Lee insists her new online venture will be a moneymaker. God tells her so every day.

Lee, an Odessa resident who grew up in Ohio, says she knows it sounds silly. But ever since she quit her job 13 months ago to create an online lost-and-found service, the former manufactured-home saleswoman has received daily signs.

One night, unable to sleep, she flipped on the television to discover a show called Lost and Found. Another time, she and her father went to Denny's to discuss her doubts about the Web site over a cup of coffee. As they left the restaurant, she found a credit card on the ground.

"Tell me that's not a sign," he told her.

Lee and her husband, Carrol, a US Airways mechanic, have a lot riding on www.publiclostandfound.com. In addition to more than a year's worth of lost salary, they've invested $10,000 in cash and borrowed another $20,000. They're also paying rent on a Tampa office and have hired the first two of 10 full-time workers who will staff their call center. They own 75 percent of the company's stock.

"I've always had the desire to work for myself," says Lee, whose first solo venture was Tele-Groceries, a short-lived home delivery service she founded in Ohio in 1990.

Here's how the new service will work: Say a New Jersey family enjoying the last day of a Fort Lauderdale vacation forgets their boom box on the beach. Come March 1, the family can search the "found" ads on www.publiclostandfound.com, or if that fails, place a "lost" ad. No computer? They can do the same via the site's 24-hour toll-free hotline. The service is free.

So who's going to foot the bill for this new public service? Business owners, Lee hopes. Under her plan, every U.S. community with more than 25,000 residents will have an exclusive local sponsor. The cost: $55 a month for a citywide sponsorship; $75 a month for a county.

In return, the sponsor will receive a mention when someone types his city or county into the site's search engine and a mention in a semi-annual newspaper ad, and it will also get local bragging rights. A veterinarian, for example, could mention her sponsorship of the service in mailings to local pet owners.

If businesses in all 4,000-plus communities sign up, Public Lost & Found Corp. could take in as much as $3.5-million a year. If only 100 do, the company probably will have to shut down the call center, its primary competitive edge over the 100 or so other lost-and-found services online. (The site signed its first sponsor last week, Budget Car Sales of Tampa.)

And that's just half the equation. To educate America about publiclostandfound.com, Lee hired a Houston publicist known as Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale to conduct a national media blitz in March.

Lee thought up the idea for the Web site at the beach one day while Carrol toyed with a metal detector.

"We have, thank God, a Red Cross for disasters and a poison control center for poisonings," Lee says. "There should be one place that a person who's lost or found something can pick up the phone, any time day or night, and call for help."

In the meantime, life continues to toss obstacles her way. Such as the local auto dealer who's accused her of rolling back the odometer on a used car she sold (she vigorously denies the charge). But Lee says she will fight to make her new venture work "until I have exhausted every single, possible resource."

"I feel like everybody on this Earth has a purpose in my life," she says, "and this is my purpose."

Julian Elliott, 47

Tampa Driver Brokerage Inc.

Amount invested: $10,000

Julian Elliott spent most of his career selling insurance. Now, he sells truck drivers.

Elliott's one-man shop finds businesses that need to move cargo but don't want the expense of hiring a full-time driver. He matches them with drivers who need work but want to remain independent. Three companies and nine drivers have signed up so far. Both sides pay for the service.

"I've simply found a niche in the market," he said.

It took 25 years of failure, heartbreak, tax hell and professional reinvention to hatch his promising business plan.

Elliott, a native of Macon, Ga., attended two years of Bible college before aimlessly venturing into the starched-white-shirt-and-briefcase world of insurance. He made a decent living, he says, until a divorce prompted him to move.

"When I got here in Florida, I realized the clientele was more sophisticated," he said. "But I guess I was always somewhat void of sales skills."

Financially, Elliott hit the skids. Then a church friend, a trucker, introduced Elliott to his boss, who took the recently remarried Elliott on a test ride. He was hooked.

"I'll tell you the true appeal," he says. "Truckers are what they are. I was something I wasn't for more than 10 years. Somebody once asked me, 'What would you do if you didn't have to impress somebody?' I said, 'I'd probably get a crew cut, grow a goatee and get rid of this shirt and tie.' So I did. . . . Immediately, I was comfortable again."

Elliott got his license and began driving short hauls as an independent contractor, no more than 500 miles round-trip. That allowed him to sleep in his own bed most nights. It also meant he could turn down unwanted gigs, something a full-time employee couldn't do.

Things changed when Elliott's wife became pregnant with their second child. Already in his mid-40s, he wanted out of the cab so he could spend more time with his family. When a large company asked for help finding independent contractors like himself, he founded Tampa Driver Brokerage Inc.

Elliott says his drivers have the best of both worlds. They drive short hauls, usually no farther than Miami, as often as they want.

"Some of these drivers are the most well-read, brilliant guys I've ever met," Elliott says. "But they have a tendency to want to be, in Georgia terms, a loose mule. Some of them could be highly successful in a corporate structure if their temperament was different, but it's not. They zig when everybody else zags."

The drivers pay Elliott a fee for helping with insurance, truck rentals and accounting.

Meanwhile, his corporate clients get drivers without the added taxes, health insurance costs and liability associated with hiring full-time staff. Elliott's cut is the difference between what his clients pay him and the wages he negotiates with his drivers. The money is helping him rehab an old Tampa house, which he will use as his office.

So far, truckers' unions haven't given him a hard time.

"If I had 150 contractors rather than nine, there could be some vicious people out there. But at this point, I'm too small to be noticed," he says.

"I hope I don't stay that way."

Cindy Kay Griffith, 37

Southern Girl Productions

Amount invested: $70,000

Cindy Kay Griffith is waging war on visible bra straps.

A first-time inventor, she raided her family's 401(k) accounts, credit cards and savings to bring her brainchild to market: "Bra Hide," a flexible, clear plastic clip that binds bra strap to blouse.

A first-time inventor, Cindy Griffith raided her family's 401(k) accounts, credit cards and savings to bring the "Bra Hide" to market.

"My sister and I were at Citrus Park Mall in May 1999, and it was hot as hell out, and we were wearing tank tops, and our bras were coming out," she said. "I prayed about it in my dreams, and this clip appeared in 3-D."

The Hillsborough High School alum says she woke up that night and bleerily sketched the clip. Her quest to tame the elusive bra strap was on.

The move from executive to entrepreneur was not entirely voluntary. Griffith enjoyed her job handling human resources at an architecture and construction company. Not even a brain tumor that consumed two-thirds of her skull and required surgery kept her away from work for long.

But getting fired "for no good reason," she says, quickly cured her of any loyalty.

"At that point," she says, "I did not want anything else to do with corporate America."

Days later, she designed the clip. Her sister initially dubbed it "StrapTease," but a trademark search showed singer Paula Abdul had reserved the name for a clothing line. Griffith's husband, Scott, who manages a Midas auto shop, suggested "Bra Hide" instead. It stuck. She even penned a ditty about it to the tune of the 1960s television theme song Rawhide.

"Keep your bra from cruisin', Bra Hide," it goes.

Like most inventions, the odds against Bra Hide are long.

First, there is the challenge of getting a patent. If it does come through, there's no guarantee consumers will buy the product. More than a dozen inventors have patented similar devices, including Chi Kim Le of St. Petersburg in 1999.

Even if consumers like Bra Hide, lingerie companies such as Victoria's Secret are bound to come up with their own product. Griffith concedes she'll have a two-year head start at best.

Risks such as these persuaded her sister and brother-in-law not to invest, leaving Griffith and her husband to finance the project.

But the seventh-generation Tampa resident has shown remarkable drive. When male engineers and manufacturers told her women would never pay $8.99 for a pair of plastic clips, she held informal focus groups that suggested otherwise. She has tentatively contracted with a Clearwater company to produce a first run of 50,000 clips, commissioned a graphic artist to design the package, installed a shrink-wrapping machine in her home and begun pitching the clips to buyers at Burdines and other retail clothiers. Press kits are on the way.

"It just seems like God's been opening every door for me along the way," she says.

Of course, none of these efforts promises success. If the project fails, Griffith says she'll get another corporate job and work on a how-to book for inventors.

And at nights, she says, she'll work on her next invention. It's a secret.

- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.

Entrepreneurial explosion

Florida businesses formed during 2000:

For-profit corporations: 119,282

Limited liability companies: 19,186

Partnerships: 4,263

Fictitious names*: 66,265

* Also known as "doing business as" names. May be registered by individuals or corporations.

Source: Division of Corporations, Florida Department of State

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