By Jessica C. Lee
Like most women of her generation, Rosemarie Correia’s goal was to get married and have kids. Working was a pastime.
Now, two decades later, her husband says he’s jealous of her love of her job.
Correia, who owns and runs Irvine office furniture dealer Systems Source Inc., said she never expected to run a company, let alone one with $100 million in yearly sales.
She started selling furniture after high school. What began as a way for Correia to bide her time before meeting a husband now is a passion.
“When I started selling furniture, it wasn’t a life dream,” Correia said. “I thought that I would do it until prince charming came along. But then I fell in love with it.”
Her company sells cubicles, chairs, cabinets, desks, lamps and other furniture to local and national companies, including Allergan Inc., Toyota Motor Corp., Countrywide Financial Corp. and the University of Phoenix.
Systems Source sells products from about 300 furniture makers, Indiana’s Kimball International Inc. and Knoll Inc. of Pennsylvania among them. It works with designers on layouts and colors.
Project and installation managers oversee orders and setups here and across the country.
Competition
Rivals are numerous, both large and small. Michigan’s Herman Miller Inc., Tangram Interiors of Santa Fe Springs and ABE Office Furniture of City of Industry are big players.
Beyond that, Systems Source competes with dozens of office furniture sellers.
“It’s a very competitive industry,” Correia said. “Our specialty is national accounts. I think that’s a big differentiator for us. If you can handle an installation in Iowa, handling an installation in Irvine is really easy.”
Systems Source has offices in Los Angeles, Texas, Arizona and Idaho and a 65,000-square-foot warehouse in Santa Fe Springs.
Correia learned about office furniture as a saleswoman at Pleion Corp., a defunct Santa Ana furniture maker. There, Correia said she learned about the different types of furniture that companies bought and how to install it.
She started Systems Source in 1983 with $5,000 and a partner, Jim Cate, a math teacher who’s since died.
Correia bought out Cate after about three years, when yearly sales were about $3 million.
Early on, Correia sold Pleion furniture after her former employer was willing to offer her credit.
Correia and Cate hired three of her former Pleion coworkers to help install furniture.
For deliveries, they contracted with independent truck drivers.
“When we started, we didn’t have a warehouse to speak of, it was more like a garage,” Correia said. “It wasn’t even a real installation crew, it was just a few of us from the office.”
Ties Correia forged at Pleion helped her land business at offices here and across the country. Through trial and error, Correia said she learned to handle orders and install furniture on time.
The errors came at a cost: If the company didn’t deliver on time or forgot a piece of furniture, Systems Source credited customers or did installations for free, she said.
“When you step into to the big boys club, you learn a whole other appreciation for all of the bosses that you had,because it’s so much harder than you think it’s going to be,” Correia said. “But then after time, you actually know what you’re doing and it brings confidence. You make a lot of mistakes, but you learn from them.”
These days, Systems Source uses its own software for big accounts. The company’s EZ Trackr helps track furniture, giving visual depictions of what’s been installed. Customers can track orders and deliveries and buy furniture online.
The company has grown with the expanding economy of the past few years. It now counts about 150 workers and a fleet of trucks.
Systems Source ranked No. 6 on the Business Journal’s 2006 list of the largest women-owned businesses here.
Correia wants to expand the business by opening more sales offices in the next five years. She said she thinks the company’s expansion plan could boost yearly sales in increments of $10 million to $20 million.
Even with a fragmented market, Systems Source isn’t looking to buy other furniture dealers, Correia said. She said she’s gotten offers of her own, but none good enough to tempt her to sell.
Systems Source wants to grow on its own, she said.
“It’s grow or die,” Correia said.
