“REFLECTIONS:” Looking Back on Four Decades in Business in the Rear View Mirror Of Experience – Decade One
By: Naomi Henderson, CEO/Co-Founder
Overview
In the coming months, in our 40th Anniversary year, a total of four essays will be presented on the theme listed above – one for each decade RIVA has been in business.
Decade one: 1981-1991
If the reasons for starting a business formed the chapters of a business textbook, the headers might read:
- Wanting to be the Boss
- Wanting to Bring a Vision/Dream to Life
- Wanting to Make Money
Since I didn’t have that textbook, my reasons didn’t fall into the realm of logic and reason, nor fueled by a vision or wealth. Instead, they slid along the murky paths of rage and perseverance.
Rage occurred more than once in RIVA’s 40-year journey. The first happened when it became clear the offices above the “glass ceiling” in corporate America, at the end of the 1970’s, had neither Blacks nor women in the C-suites. While I had reached the level of Senior Analyst in a corporation, the next leap to project and staff management included a swampy journey across quicksand and raging rivers while thirty people competed for two management slots. For sure, the feisty Black woman wasn’t even at the front of the pack.
I left corporate America and the glass ceiling rage behind, and joined forces with three dear friends who added me to their firm to round out services to clients. One partner had Public Relations clients and the other garnered management consulting clients and my role would be to conduct research for both my clients and theirs. We all shared similar values and a genuine liking for each other, but as business partners, the mix didn’t reach either short-or long-term goals in the two years we shared office space. Parting on good terms and honoring the lessons learned, we each moved on to other business configurations.
Rage reappeared while partnering in a second company totally focused on qualitative market research. I brought a cadre of clients with me to that firm, composed of two partners and myself, again, each bringing a skill that implied an ability to support clients.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get invited to the bottom of their iceberg which included using the cover of the market research business to pander to the drug needs of Washington DC politicians by selling cocaine. While my research projects carried the operating expenses of the company, their revenues went into their pockets and they were always “working on some plans to bring in business.” They went to a lot of meetings away from the office, they just weren’t for the business of generating revenue for our joint venture.
The tipping point to exit that company came when I arrived early from a business trip because the client cancelled the last day of one-on-one interviews stating, “We have heard enough to start on our strategy plan, we’ll pay the cancellation fee and expect your report early next week.”
Happy to be getting home a day early, I arrived at my office on Thursday instead of the Friday expected date, only to discover that Kevin, the smooth marketing guy hired to build business, sitting at my desk, cutting cocaine with baby laxatives and making a stack of one-time use bags. He wore an apron and a mask to keep himself neat, clean, and sober, and probably would have cleaned up my desk in plenty of time for my expected return the next day. Never got clear on reasons he didn’t use his desk.
I found out later that everyone on staff knew about the iceberg business operating underneath the legitimate business, except me. My steady travel assignments kept me on the road 17 out of 21 working days a month and hardly ever at my desk except on the weekends, which worked perfectly for their clandestine activities. I did notice on my way into the office that morning, a limo with a low plate number, parked at the curb just outside our ground level suite of offices. Clearly, that limo driver ferried Kevin’s bags to his boss!
Something inside me said “be cool,” and I did, telling Kevin that when he was finished, to meet me in Mark’s office [the other partner – Wharton School of Finance graduate and CFO]. He did so 20 minutes later, sans mask and apron and said, “Why didn’t you call to say you would be back early?” I replied: “I work here, I’m a partner, I don’t have to report my whereabouts to you – why didn’t you tell me you planned to used my desk as the distribution center for your drug business?” He had the grace to look chagrined and Mark piped up, “Now you know what we’ve been doing—you want in? delivered with a smug smile.
Hot rage boiled inside and I put a lid on it by replying, “No, I don’t want in – I want out. this is my last day here – you have a choice, I can buy you both out and you leave the business today, or you can sign an agreement to buy me out and I leave today.” In unison they chimed: “We’ll buy you out.” I know their primary thought included the hope and freedom my exit signaled, meant they could operate fully in the light, since all the staff were in on the game. We agreed on a fee to buy me out and Mark wrote me a check for 50% that day from his personal checkbook and signed a promissory note for the remainder to be paid in 60 days.
That Sunday, over a long Memorial Day weekend, I hired a pickup truck and a team of men, to remove all the furniture and office supplies bought with my personal income [which I used to fund the start-up]. I left them with some folding chairs and art work we had purchased with corporate funds. I can only imagine their surprise when they came in on Monday! In place were their desks, desk chairs, and bookcases and nothing else. I even took area rugs, dishes and pans I had brought from home.” My rage dialed down to simmer with a tinge of revenge for seasoning.
June 1, 1981, RIVA Associates emerged from the ashes of my rage and I began work in my basement, with an inky furred cat named Blackjack, a two-line phone and an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter and a ton of business furniture. Mark kept his word and paid the remaining 50% to me in less than 60 days and our paths split.
Six months later, they closed the office to avoid paying rent, and continued to conduct their true business from their homes. 40 years later, Matt is dead – victim of pancreatic cancer and last I heard, Kevin is still selling drugs, this time in San Francisco.
I started RIVA Associates fueled with anger to prove the following:
- I didn’t need partners to be successful.
- Rage is a good emotion to provide energy to work 100-hour weeks.
- Living the adage: “If you do what you love, the money will follow.”
I worked long hours with the cat and the typewriter, with the full support of my husband, Luc, who took over running our household and freed me up to seek out clients, serve existing clients, obtain a business loan, and build a market research business based on integrity.
The milieu that surrounding the founding of RIVA Associates might have stopped someone with an MBA, something I lacked. Forging ahead, powered with rage and determination, I paid no attention to the fact that America, mired knee-deep in a recession that year, didn’t provide fertile ground for a new business. Bank loans for a Black, woman-owned firm resulted in 10 rejections with the 11th bank saying “yes” to 50% of my requested amount and only if my husband co-signed. Clients wanted three references before they signed on and only promised to pay a deposit on contract signing and the full payment if satisfied with results.
Clearly the deck of cards I had in my hand didn’t come anywhere near a royal flush with a buyer’s market in place.
However, rage, coupled with determination and perseverance are powerful stimulants leading to the development of creative business solutions. Which in turn, led to a steady stream of satisfied clients and word-of-mouth referrals, resulting in enough revenue to open an office in downtown Bethesda in 1982, the same year RIVA Training Institute came into being.
The Institute exists as the brainchild of my sister Jo Ann Hairston after we went to New York City to take a one-day workshop in NYC purported to be for moderators who had led over 100 groups and seeking ways to be more effective. It turned out to be an ego-driven class taught by a PhD who pontificated about his skills rather than a skill-building course for those registered. On the train ride home, she said if I wanted to build my skills, one way would be do research about what comprised “best practices.” Best advice ever!
Not long after that journey, a client called and said: “We like the way you conduct qualitative market research – can you teach us what you are doing so we can be better clients?” We added the Institute’s name to our corporate brand, called ourselves Co-Founders, and RIVA Associates became, RIVA Market Research & Training Institute.
JoAnn and I stayed up all night, before the first class, building a 200-page three ring notebook for the students in that class, and finalizing the operating principles on which that class would be taught. One of those precepts: “Teach in such a way we would enjoy being students in that class.” That meant no pontificating or indicating that the RIVA method eclipsed all other moderating models. It also meant determining exactly what became necessary to teach “best practices”: a blend of lecture and experiential learning.
In that first decade, RIVA also created a research facility with a one-way mirror, observation room, catering kitchen, phone bank for recruiters and offices – all atop a Chinese restaurant where the rent came in low but fire insurance costs exceeded the norm. A side benefit included serious discounts on delicious meals.
RIVA became one of the few firms that hosted focus groups with men diagnosed with HIV/Aids because other facilities feared problems with that target population in residence. (Research indicated that being in the presence of someone with HIV/Aids had a low risk of infection as long as body fluids did not transfer.) Our willingness led to scores of additional projects for the CDC, The Whitman-Walker Clinic, and several local hospitals and pharma companies, exponentially swelling RIVA’s revenues.
Focus groups for Fortune 500 companies also abounded in this time and RIVA staff became equally adept at conducting students for Black as well as mainstream consumers, due to an ability to straddle racial divides with ease. Student enrollments, initially focused on those wanting to be independent moderators, but quickly morphed into classes for researchers in corporate America who wanted to bring qualitative skills inside their organizations.
We registered as a minority, woman-owned business with the Federal government and several organizations certified us as such. Government studies formed less than 15% of corporate revenues with the lion’s share coming from corporate America. In our first decade, the client list grew to include more than 50 companies with 66% of them coming back for repeat business.
Luc came aboard in the late 1980’s as RIVA’s CFO and became enamored of the delicious freedom of qualitative research over the stringent rules of quantitative research he performed as an economist. He worked for RIVA up until six weeks before his passing in 2005, earning high praise from the clients he served as a moderator and trainer.
RIVA rage and determination paid off in our first decade. In the decades that followed, rage dropped away, and perseverance, integrity, and creative solutions took its place, making a small company of women a recognized leader in the field of qualitative research and training.