When Linda Burkett started at Bergen Brunswig Corp., she was a 17-year-old file clerk with a long pony tail living in New Jersey and the company was simply Bergen Drug Co. Thirty-one years later, Bergen has acquired Brunswig, headquarters has moved to California, and she’s the CIO, overseeing 442 employees, with an annual $54 million budget and a classic short ‘do.
Burkett was one of six honorees at the Orange County Business Journal’s 6th annual Women in Business Awards luncheon on Thursday, attended by about 780 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.
She also is president of a software company, a Bergen subsidiary, where she oversees 75 employees, and has championed Bergen’s e-commerce effort. (Bergen is the distributor for eight healthcare-related dot-coms, like HealthCentral.com and More.com.)
“She worked for me when she first came to the company,” said Jim McLaughlin, vice president of resource and development. “Today I work for her.”
And that doesn’t bother McLaughlin at all.
“I’ve seen every CIO they’ve ever had. She’s absolutely top-notch,” he said. “She is without question the most loving person in our organization,” said Barbara Pronin, another Bergen employee.
When people talk about Burkett, they use adjectives like “loving,” “giving,” “accessible,” and “top-notch.”
But she’s also knowledgeable and has worked in every area of technology, including programming, computer operations and the tape library. And like technology itself, she has adapted and flourished in a field that hasn’t always been friendly to women.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the era of punch cards, women didn’t work in what was then called data processing. But Burkett said she didn’t want to be an accountant, a nurse or a teacher.
“I chose data processing,” she says.
She attended trade school for programming and attempted to get a job as a COBOL programmer, but no one was hiring women, she said. Then she was advised to get an entry-level job and work her way up. That’s what she did.
After many years in technology, she said one of the ways it has changed is that techie types aren’t locked up alone in a closet anymore to crank out code or work on a project, now they are expected to work well with others and have business savvy.
“They are more sensitive to the needs of people,” she said.
She said she’s been able to stay at Bergen for so long because of the constant change and the evolving technology.
As far as advice for women, she said that although the technology field is friendly to women now, in general the glass ceiling is still intact, so she tells them to go higher and expect equal pay.
KAREN CAPLAN
President, Frieda’s Inc.
Frieda’s Inc. was founded by entrepreneur Frieda Caplan,Karen’s mom,in 1962 and has made a name for itself as a specialty produce wholesaler that has introduced a variety of foods to America’s tables, including kiwi fruit, spaghetti squash, shallots and Latin and Asian specialties.
Karen Caplan, Frieda’s oldest daughter, started working in the business as a 10-year-old and rose through the ranks to become president and COO of the 100-employee company in 1986 at the age of 30. Her sister, Jackie Caplan Wiggins, is vice president and Frieda Caplan remains chairwoman. The Los Alamitos-based company has an 81,000-square-foot warehouse that distributes produce to grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada and maintains a mail-order division that serves the food-service industry and handles special orders and gift baskets.
The company, which ranked No. 8 on last year’s Business Journal list of women-owned companies with $26.5 million in revenue, has had a web presence since 1996 and was an industry trendsetter in offering product information and recipes via e-mail and through a toll-free consumer hotline.
Caplan was responsible for establishing marketing and quality-assurance departments and instituted a new-products committee in 1993. Earlier, she implemented a recipe press-release program targeted at food editors nationwide. The company will debut several new items,including a premium mango, a papaya from Brazil and organic tofu,next week at the Food Institute Marketing Show in Chicago.
“We have over 500 specialty items today,” Caplan told the audience at the Women in Business awards last week. “Those kumquats on the table are ours.”
A California native, Caplan earned her bachelor’s in agricultural economics and business management from UC Davis. She was the first female president of the Los Angeles-based Fresh Produce & Floral Council, for which she developed an annual conference for food professionals, retailers, educators and nutritionists. She also has been a board member of the Produce Marketing Association, a national trade group, and in 1995 was elected to the board of the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, another national trade group.
Her efforts to spread the word about exotic produce have led to speaking engagements for industry groups and guest appearances on television and radio shows.
A mentor for women, Caplan has been involved with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Entrepreneurial Exchange Program and established an annual agricultural scholarship for women to encourage them to pursue agricultural careers.
MARIA CHAVEZ WILCOX
President/CEO
Orange County’s United Way
When Chavez-Wilcox graduated from Boston University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1983, she took a position as management trainee at United Way of America. Now, 20 years later, she heads an operation that has seen donations grow from about $18 million in 1996 when she took over to $23.8 million in 1999.
In addition to increased revenue, Chavez-Wilcox has been credited with reducing operating expenses to 12.6% of the budget from 19% and reducing the percentage of uncollected pledges. She has also overseen the elimination of line-of-credit borrowing and kept expenses under budget each year.
Her three-year strategy to increase revenue to $30 million by 2001 appears to be on course. The agency raised $19.5 million in 1997, $21.5 million in 1998 and $24 million in 1999. The increase in funding has enabled United Way to increase allocations to nonprofit agencies in OC by an average of 24% through 1999.
Chavez-Wilcox, a Peruvian native whose family fled communist rule when she was a child, has been recognized as one of the top Hispanic leaders in the U.S. Locally, she has received numerous kudos for her leadership, and will be given the Amelia Earhart Award by UCI’s Women’s Opportunity Center later this month.
Achievements aside, however, Chavez-Wilcox’s staff was unable to persuade her to consider preparing comments for last week’s presentation in case she won.
“It’s difficult for me to be speechless,” she said, adding that she was most thrilled that philanthropy was being recognized as a business, and a thriving one, in Orange County.
Chavez-Wilcox is active in the Women’s Roundtable of Orange County and is a mentor for both the Women’s Partnering Network and Hispanic Development Council and speaks to non-profit organizations about fundraising on a regular basis.
For Chavez-Wilcox, United Way is a family affair,her husband was a senior vice president at United Way of Los Angeles who has since taken the position of executive director of the CHOC Foundation. The couple, who have no children, reside in Long Beach. When time permits, Chavez-Wilcox enjoys the movies and the performing arts.
