By Nicole Nascenzi, Tulsa World, Okla. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Jul. 20--Small-business activity has increased as area corporations have downsized.
At a time when layoffs abound and the business world is rife with scandal, many in the Tulsa area have decided to forsake the corporate life and go into business for themselves.
Local experts say their offices are flooded with entrepreneurs seeking advice and money to jump start their American dream.
"We have seen quite an influx of people recently," said John Blue, coordinator of the Northeastern State University Oklahoma Small Business Development Center in Tulsa.
The center offers a slew of business support services and counseling.
Blue credits the recent increase in traffic at his office to the flood of layoffs the Tulsa area has seen during the past year.
John Anderson, senior vice president for the business services group at the Bank of Oklahoma, said he has seen a significant increase in small business loans recently.
After 25 years in the telecommunications business, Ray Gambill was laid off from Tulsa-based Williams Communications Group Inc. in June 2001, just one day before his family was set to depart on a three-week vacation.
"We decided, `This isn't going to kill us, and I can go back and look for a job,' " Gambill said.
After several weeks in sunny Florida, Gambill came back to the cold reality of a job search and found that the positions available in his field would require him to uproot his family.
Gambill said the family recently built a house in Owasso, and his two children were happy in the Owasso school system.
"I did not want to relocate," he said.
Instead of taking a job in another state, Gambill began to research opening a franchise. His wife, Jackie, said she was "horrified" at the thought of her husband becoming a small business owner.
"He had invested so much time in telecommunications that I thought he should be looking for a job in it," she said.
After hours of Internet research, he kept coming back to one company -- California-based Budget Blinds.
The Gambills flew out to the company's headquarters to learn more about owning a franchise.
Jackie Gambill said she struggled to be supportive of her husband's dreams.
"We didn't know anything about blinds, but he wanted to do it so badly," she said.
Ray Gambill said he underwent weeks of intensive training at the corporation's headquarters and came back to Oklahoma ready to hit the ground running. The Gambills opened a home-based Budget Blinds franchise last October.
Jackie Gambill was still employed at Williams Communications, and her husband's severance package afforded the family some stability while the business was starting up.
Today, the couple could hang window treatments in their sleep.
Ray Gambill recruited the help of another former Williams Communications employee, Stacy Newell, and began to get the business up and running.
To help with the business, Jackie Gambill volunteered to be laid off in May.
"Because of the name Budget Blinds, people think we sell cheap products," Ray Gambill said. "What it really means is that I can find something to fit your budget."
Ray Gambill said he has created window treatments that range from $15 per window up to $800 per window.
To display the high quality of their products, the Gambills opened a store last week in the Owasso Market, a shopping center at the northwest corner of 96th Street North and U.S. 169.
"My friends thought I was nuts," Ray Gambill said.
Now, the entrepreneur said, he makes about the same income he had at Williams Communications but doesn't always have to work a full week.
One of Ray Gambill's friends who questioned his venture into the world of window treatments is Scott Peck. He worked for Gambill at Williams Communications and lost his job last November.
"I was scared, real scared," Peck said.
He had worked hard to buy a farm in Collinsville and said he thought losing his job would put his home and his marriage in jeopardy.
After spending about a week feeling sorry for himself, Peck said he began to think about what to do next. At 41, he was far from retirement age, but did not relish the thought of looking for another corporate job.
"I had always wanted to go into business for myself -- to put money in my own pocket and be my own boss," he said. "When I lost that job, I re-evaluated what was important in my life."
Eventually, Peck decided to go into business as a handyman.
"No job is too small," he said.
Peck said he has done everything from building privacy fences and cleaning pool decks to hanging pictures and repairing leaking refrigerators.
"That list you made for your husband to do, that he is too busy to do -- that is what I do," he said.
At first, business was slow, and he began by doing work for friends. As he slowly built a reputation of being reliable and affordable, business picked up.
Most of his business is from referrals and repeat customers, Peck said.
Peck said his wife, who is still employed at Williams Communications, has been a "huge inspiration."
Although he makes less money than he did working for Williams Communications, the handyman said he is happy.
"Life is a lot simpler now, and I enjoy it."
Not all former employees of Williams Communications decided to forsake the telecom industry.
In the months before he was laid off from the local telecom company, Stan Chase was spending nights and weekends developing his next business venture -- Anodyne Technologies.
With a history in telecommunications dating back to 1995 with the Oklahoma City-based start-up Rock Island Group, Chase said he has an "entrepreneurial spirit" and wanted to start another company.
Chase said he was working with another Williams Communications employee, Brad Thomas, to develop Anodyne.
"As we started to anticipate the layoffs, we accelerated our timeline," he said.
Chase said he lost his job as director of the streaming communications service group in May, and Thomas volunteered to be laid off in June. By July 1, Oklahoma City-based Anodyne Technologies opened its doors.
Currently, the network-services company employs five people and has a sales staff in Tulsa.
Chase said he hopes the company will be profitable by the end of the year and that it eventually will be the major network management and security company for small- and medium-size businesses in this market.
There are others in the Tulsa area who were let go from other companies and then decided to start their own businesses.
Shannon Thompson had worked as a regional vice president for sales and marketing for Webzone, a local Internet service provider. The company was sold to Rocky Mountain Internet, a Denver-based company that later became Internet Commerce and Communications, and the Tulsa office was closed in September.
A week after being laid off, Thompson started Web Solutions of Tulsa with two other former Webzone employees.
The Web page design firm filled in the gap left when Webzone closed its doors, Thompson said.
Armed with an MBA and a marketing background, Thompson said he could have found a job but decided he had enough of failed companies and wanted to go into business for himself.
Like Thompson, Jason Connell said he was tired of working for promising companies that did not deliver.
Connell, a videographer, was laid off from Commercial Financial Services Inc. in 1999, BuyItNow.com in July 2000 and then from Orca Media last February.
"Three times is enough," Connell said. "I got tired of getting excited about where a company was going" only to be let down.
Soon after his last layoff, Connell opened Connell Creations, a video production company. Since then he has been busy creating instructional videos and filming video to be used on real estate and home builders' Web sites.
Like Connell, John Lew had been laid off several times in just a few years.
Lew last his job at Commercial Financial Services in 1999 and then again in August 2001 when CitiGroup Corp., which purchased the Tulsa-based financial services company The Associates, shut down the division where he worked.
Lew spent the rest of 2001 planning and researching options before opening John Lew Photography in January.
"It was one of those critical points in your life," he said. "Photography has always been my passion, and the layoff gave me the opportunity to follow my dreams."
Lew said he specializes in wedding photography and family portraits.
He set up a darkroom in the bathroom of his family's home and develops and prints his black and white work. He uses Fromex Photo Imaging, a local photo lab, to print his color pictures.
Being in business for himself enables Lew to be a stay-at-home father for his three children.
"I'm home in the morning to get the kids off to school and home in the afternoon when they get home," he said.
Lew said he puts his 11-month old son in a "daddy's day out" program two days a week so he can focus on his business. His wife is home on the weekends, when he does most of his photography.
"I'm now doing something I really love to do," Lew said.
The trend of laid-off workers turning into entrepreneurs is not limited to the Tulsa area.
Cliff Eslinger, senior vice president of Spherion Corp.'s human capital consulting group in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said about 5 percent of the 25,000 or so employees that the outplacement services firm deals with each year decide to start their own businesses.
Eslinger said it is difficult to track entrepreneurs because many laid-off workers do contract or free-lance work during the transition to another job.
He said there are jobs out there for people, but many families do not want to relocate. Also, he said, people take a layoff as an opportunity to get into another line of work.
To see more of the Tulsa World, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.tulsaworld.com.
(c) 2002, Tulsa World, Okla. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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