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Women in Business Award winners span tech to tacos

When Cynthia Harriss gave the keynote address at last year’s Women in Business awards luncheon, she called the winners “individuals who will serve us as role models.”

This year, she’s one of them.

Harriss was one of six honorees at the Orange County Business Journal’s 7th annual Women in Business Awards luncheon on Wednesday attended by about 900 people at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.

In the past year, Harriss, the 49-year-old president of the Disneyland Resort, has overseen the opening of Walt Disney Co.’s California Adventure theme park, the Grand Californian Hotel and Downtown Disney. Combined, it was the largest single development in Disney history.

At the same time, Harriss had to keep attention focused on the original Disneyland to shore up its role as the central element in Disney’s Anaheim empire.

To staff Disney’s expansion, Harriss also headed up the largest hiring drive undertaken at Disneyland,an effort that added more than 8,000 “cast members” to the company’s payroll. That hiring binge brought the total employee count at the Disneyland Resort to more than 20,000 at peak (despite about 400 recent layoffs), the most in the county and more than the entire population of Canton, Ill., where Harriss was born.

Despite a rainy opening for California Adventure and news-making accidents and mishaps at the resort, Harriss still calls herself the “luckiest person alive.” She said she’s “thrilled” to have the chance to lead the Disneyland Resort,a place she and her three sisters only dreamed of visiting as children growing up in the Midwest.

Harriss began her career with specialty retailer Paul Harris Stores Inc. (no relation) selling apparel. She rose through the ranks to become senior vice president of stores for the Indianapolis-based chain. And that caught the attention of Paul Pressler, then president of Disney Stores and now chairman of Disney’s Parks and Resorts division.

Pressler recruited Harriss to the Disney Stores, where she spent five years helping the retail operation increase its numbers from 140 to 460 stores in North America.

In 1997, Harriss joined Disneyland as vice president of theme park operations and merchandise. When Pressler was promoted to president of parks and resorts in 1999, she was named executive vice president of the resort, responsible for overall management and the long-term growth of all park and hotel operations.

Harriss said she hasn’t faced any particular challenges as a woman in business that are different from those anyone else has faced. She said her biggest challenge has probably been “working in a male environment and still keeping your own personality.”

Harriss says she tries to spend time in the parks at least a few times a week, if not every day. During the company’s massive recruiting effort she went to every job fair,which at one point meant weekly visits. She also tried each ride at California Adventure, attended countless meetings about details of the expansion and appeared at numerous speaking engagements both before and after the new park opened.

In January, she received the Tree of Life Award from the Jewish National Fund at a ceremony that raised about $250,000 to help alleviate a water crisis in Israel.

Some people contend that Internet sites and media attention make her the most-recognized Disneyland official since Walt Disney. Her own infectious enthusiasm for co-workers and visitors alike probably doesn’t hurt, either.

Harriss says she has “great affection” for cast members and says meeting a wide variety of people is her favorite part of the job.

Bill Ross, senior vice president of public affairs for Disneyland, says Harriss has “more best friends than anyone I know.”

Harriss accepts the credit for accomplishments, but unfailingly points to the cast members around her for Disneyland’s perceived successes. In particular, she cites the extra effort put out by front-line workers,like the 1,000 hours donated to community service by employees during a period largely devoted to pre-opening work for the new park, and the $1 million raised by charity events at pre-opening activities.

What Harriss doesn’t tell you about is her own contributions to community activities.

Richard Stein, executive director of the Laguna Playhouse, has seen those contributions first-hand. He says Harriss, who lives in Laguna Beach and is on the board of the playhouse, is different from corporate leaders who participate in arts organizations simply to enhance the image of their companies. Stein said Harriss simply loves the theater.

In the past year, she arranged donations to the theater to help fund a school program and served on the capital campaign organizing committee (for a playhouse expansion).

“She doesn’t miss a single show here,” Stein said. “I think the only place she feels happier to be than the happiest place on earth is the Laguna Playhouse.”

,Sandi Cain


Sandi Spivey

Senior human resources director,

Taco Bell Corp.

Sandi Spivey got her first taste for Taco Bell as a 16-year-old high school student working as a cashier in one of the chain’s first 100 locations.

“I couldn’t stand my mom’s cooking,” Spivey said. “She decided to cook liver once a week. I couldn’t stand the smell. So I got a job.”

That was 32 years ago. Decades later, Spivey is back at Taco Bell,this time as a wife, mother of two and senior human resources leader. As Taco Bell battles a sales slump, she’s overseen about $30 million in cost savings and enhanced productivity this year alone.

“She is a true leader and tireless employee advocate,” said Spivey’s boss Frank Tucker, vice president of human resources at Irvine-based Taco Bell, a unit of Louisville, Ky.-based Tricon Global Restaurants Inc.

In 1995, Spivey was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a relapse in 1998. At that time, she was diagnosed with metastic breast cancer of the bone, which has a bleak prognosis.

When Spivey learned of the relapse, she was undergoing chemotherapy and studying to take a test for an advanced degree in human resources. She said she wondered if she should even bother.

“I decided I should just go for it because the worst thing that could happen is I would live and I could use my professional designation in the future,” Spivey said. “That’s kind of the attitude I’ve taken the whole time I need to just keep moving ahead.”

Spivey joined the Mexican fast-food chain in 1993 after putting in several years at other companies in the food service industry, including Tricon’s KFC Corp., Advantica Restaurant Group Inc.’s Denny’s and CKE Restaurants Inc.’s Carl’s Jr., where she started her career in human resources in 1976.

After a few years, she moved to KFC, where she said she gained field-training experience, which she then took to Tricon sister company Taco Bell in 1993.

Spivey has sought to share her skills. She has been president and served on the board of the Council of Hotel Restaurant Trainers, a group of about 200 trainers from the U.S. and Canada.

Besides being a great way to network, Spivey says the experience bolstered her management skills and gave her a pulse on what other companies were doing in human resources training.

Spivey also is active in raising money for breast cancer research. Last year she raised more than $15,000 on the Avon 3-Day Breast Cancer Crusade, a 60-mile walk from Santa Barbara to Malibu. She also serves on the board of Y-ME Orange County Breast Cancer Organization and counsels other women with breast cancer for a national hotline council.

“Knowing that things may not be good for me, I want to make sure it will be good for people in the future,” Spivey said

Spivey said she goes to the doctor every three months for what she calls a “three-month horizon.” Her health is stable, but she is uncertain about the future. But, she said, “Instead of sitting back, I’ve decided to be proactive.”

Spivey’s positive attitude and professionalism has inspired others, including Ellen Thompson of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Irvine office, who worked with Spivey at Taco Bell and called her “my hero.”

In the meantime, Spivey continues her push at Taco Bell. Last week she started conducting national training workshops for company and franchise locations to help reduce the number of employee turnovers.

“I plan to stay alive,” Spivey said with a smile. “And I would also like to run the field human resource function for Taco Bell. I really like working with the people who work in the restaurants.”

,Jennifer Bellantonio


ANDREA KLEIN

Chief executive officer,

Rand Technology Inc.

Andrea Klein started honing her business skills as a child, when she would come home with all the other kids’ allowances.

“I was this maverick child,” Klein said. “Washing dogs for money. Singing in front of the Christmas tree, charging people 50 cents to watch me. I would sell all these things. It wasn’t because of the money. It never has been. I just love hawking stuff.”

Making calls from her kitchen table nearly a decade ago, it may not have seemed to Klein that her Rand Technology Inc. would become what it is today: a company with $300 million in annual sales and business across the world.

Klein has pushed Irvine-based Rand,affectionately named for her favorite author and philosopher Ayn Rand,and its 60 workers to become a key electronic components procurement company for computer makers. Rand counts some of the largest names in the technology world among its customers.

After quitting a job at another company where she closed 90% of total sales, Klein set out on her own by getting some unsecured loans from friends. Approaching her business from the rank-and-file sales side, Klein said she learned the intricacies of finance and accounting as she went along.

According to those who work with her, Klein was a quick study.

“It’s hard to take someone who knows about sales and teach them finance,” said Scott Schiffer of accounting firm Kieckhafer Schiffer & Co. “She’s really taken to it well. Rand’s success is due to her direct involvement.”

Klein’s sales background has helped her make Rand a place where employees can grow, she says.

“This is a place where people come and consider their work a career, rather than just a job,” Klein says.

Klein practices a hands-all-over approach. She regularly grabs a weapon from her days in sales force trenches,the telephone.

“She makes calls. She makes cold calls. Her day is working with customers, talking to them,” said Jeffrey Elder, Rand’s chief financial officer.

Those who work with Klein say her time managing some of the company’s best accounts is an example for the sales force and a goal to achieve. Employees see Klein as an invaluable resource, and Klein is more than happy to oblige, often coaching the sales force on the best ways to keep customers happy,a simple method she’s coined, “The Rand Way.”

Since Rand’s inception, Klein has received three offers to sell the company to larger competitors that would have left her with millions of dollars. She’s declined for a simple reason: She’s not done yet. Each of the times she’s seen one of her other competitors sell out, its employees end up losing out, she said.

“They get raked over the coals and then they get fired. And I didn’t want to dilute what I had done for the company,” Klein said.

If Klein’s desire to forgo cashing out says anything about her love of the business, it also speaks to her ideals. Klein’s fiscal conservatism coupled with her own entrepreneurial background has ingrained the self-starter culture in Rand.

“I don’t believe in altruism,” Klein said.

Still, Klein is charitable. She gives money,sometimes anonymously,to various groups because she says she wants to, not because she ought to.

“I support choice. I support the Red Cross. I give a lot of money to AIDS charities,” said Klein, who emphasizes that her fiscal conservatism doesn’t bleed into her social politics.

She also was a large donor to Al Gore’s presidential campaign and has donated money to politicians both local and statewide.

Klein’s politics don’t deter her from liking traditionally conservative Orange County or her house in Corona del Mar.

“This place is beautiful. I drive myself so hard and I’m so Type A that it’s nice to have a place to be laid back and relax,” Klein said. “This isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is my life and you have to do it right.”

,Andrew Simons


MONICA E. GARCIA

Chief executive, Complas Inc.

Monica E. Garcia, owner and chief executive of Corona-based Complas Inc., created her business a decade ago over her mother’s coffee table.

In 1989, in a small building in Laguna Niguel, she set out to become the chief cable service provider for Pacific Bell. Since then, Garcia has gone from having three employees to more than 340 workers with 16 locations nationwide and yearly sales of $250 million.

“Complas is Monica’s child,” said David McKeever, marketing director of the company.

Garcia’s company, which sells telecommunication equipment and services to companies such as Lucent Technologies Inc. and Belden Inc., was ranked the No. 1 Hispanic-owned business in the Inland Empire and came in 83rd in the Working Woman Top 500 Women-Owned Business List.

Last week, Garcia was in New York receiving a business leadership award from the National Minority Supplier Development Council.

Garcia also is active in the community, participating in the CEO Roundtable, an organization that promotes ties between business, the community and the University of California, Irvine. Garcia also is a board member of UCI’s Women’s Opportunities Center and a board member for Girls Inc. of Orange County.

Garcia’s generosity extends beyond the office, according to McKeever who’s known Garcia since before she started Complas.

“She’s helped out numerous people in their personal lives beyond the office. She’s even helped employees pay their children’s tuition for school,” McKeever said. “That shows you her strong belief in education.”

,Stephine Michrina


STEPHANIE N. McCLELLAN

Doctor’s Office for Women,

Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian

Dr. Stephanie McClellan, who has practiced obstetrics and gynecology for more than 15 years in Orange County, is taking on a new role these days.

She’s involved in bringing a broad vision of what women’s healthcare should be to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach.

McClellan is serving as medical advisor to the planned $100 million Women’s Pavilion set to be built on Hoag’s campus. The idea for a sweeping women’s health program, McClellan said, germinated while she was a resident physician at the Los Angeles County Women’s Hospital in the mid-1980s.

“It was a pre-eminent program nationally and understood women’s health issues,” McClellan said. “We’re a blessed community, bright and affluent. We can define excellence.”

Hoag’s Women’s Pavilion came about first because the hospital was required to build a new tower to comply with California’s hospital earthquake safety law. But McClellan said she saw it in a different way.

“My part was showing that we have a rare opportunity to have (specialized) services,” McClellan said. “What women want, they should have.”

Hoag is in the midst of a campaign to raise $50 million for its pavilion, which is slated to have 309,000 square feet of space and eight stories. The remaining money is set to come from a mix of reserves and bond funds. The pavilion is scheduled to start taking patients at the end of 2004.

Ginny Ueberroth, wife of businessman Peter Ueberroth, as well as Sandy Sewell and Arden Flamson, directors of the Hoag Hospital Foundation, are leading the pavilion campaign. McClellan also is a foundation board member.

As for her campaign role, McClellan has appeared at luncheons and other functions to inform community members and promote the women’s pavilion concept. She noted that people who are donating to the campaign often are citing personal situations, such as a child with an eating disorder or surviving breast cancer.

The Women’s Pavilion calls for around 100 beds to be added to the hospital. A range of services primarily geared toward female patients also is planned, including birthing facilities, an area for high-risk delivery care, a perimenopausal clinic and the Hoag Breast Care and Imaging Center.

McClellan noted that focusing on menopausal health is important because women’s responses aren’t homogeneous, and they have different health issues at different ages.

McClellan also sees the pavilion providing services other than OB-GYN or breast care, including eating disorders.

“It’s crazy not to have a program,” she said, noting that such problems are found in all ages of people and range from starvation to obesity-related disorders.

Even before getting involved in the Hoag pavilion campaign, McClellan’s had a long history providing healthcare to OC women. She established Doctor’s Office for Women, which has offices in Newport Beach and Irvine, in 1987. The practice has an all-female, seven-person staff that treats approximately 30,000 patients annually and has seen more than 250,000 women since opening its doors.

McClellan has practiced at Hoag since 1989. She was elected vice chair of the hospital’s OB-GYN department in 1995 and became the department’s chair two years later.

Among other things, McClellan said she believed that having an obstetrician on site around the clock could improve the health of mothers and babies. As a result of her work, all of Hoag’s staff OB-GYN doctors serve on a voluntary, rotating night panel.

McClellan also was able to execute a vision she had about breast health into Hoag’s breast care and imaging center. And she helped initiate a new, non-surgical treatment for uterine fibroids and bring urogynecology services to the hospital.

McClellan, a married mother of three sons, received her undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Southern California. She gave birth to her oldest son when she was an intern in the process of earning her medical degree and was counseled by one of her advisers to give up her medical career.

But today, McClellan believes that perceptions of women physicians, particularly OB-GYNs, have changed. Many female patients often express a preference to have a woman direct their healthcare, and female OB-GYNs who participate in health insurance plans often are heavily booked.

“Patient acceptance is so huge that it encourages more and more women,” she said.

,Vita Reed


LINDA REYES STONE

Chief executive, president,

APR Consulting Inc.

When Linda Reyes Stone came to the U.S. in 1968, she set out to be a teacher as she had been in the Philippines. But while waiting for a position to open, Stone got into technology and never looked back.

After spending a decade or so working in various data processing positions at big names such as Rockwell International Corp., Hughes Aircraft Co. and Southern California Gas Co., Stone decided to go out on her own.

In 1976, Stone started staffing service APR Consulting Inc. and ran it out of her garage in Brea. The payoff: more money from companies,now clients,she previously worked for.

Since then, the privately held business has expanded to about 150 employees and counts annul revenue of about $12 million, according to Stone.

The company is based in Tustin with offices in Diamond Bar, Glendale and a satellite location in Atlanta. Along with Rockwell and the Gas Co., Stone also counts Verizon Wireless as a client. She said she has two other undisclosed business deals in the works that she anticipates will double her staff next month.

“I set goals that are attainable and stay focused until I get there,” Stone said. “I’m not afraid to take a risk and try things out.”

That attitude has helped Stone move up in a male-dominated profession, she said, despite encountering chauvinism and arrogance from competitive male colleagues.

“I know it hurt, but I just had to brush it off and move on. I made it,” she said.

Stone and her company have earned several awards, including one from Asian Enterprise Magazine. Southern California Edison honored her company’s “exemplary performance in strategic sourcing.” She also received a commendation from Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.

APR has been ranked as one of the fastest-growing businesses in the Southland, and one of the top 100 woman-owned and minority businesses in OC, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.

“The business I’m in gives me the ability to help people, to help those who want to help themselves and it’s very rewarding,” Stone said. “The money comes later.”

In 1999, two Asian women asked Stone to help them start a new healthcare business. They were facing the threat of losing their jobs because the company they worked for was going out of business.

“I thought about it and I knew they were driven. So I said OK. I’ll train you and mentor you to run the business, but you should be ready to put in the hours that are required to be a business owner,” Stone said.

Stone bought the business,called 24-Hour Caregivers LLC. She said it now is profitable. The company provides staffing services to hospitals.

But Stone didn’t stop there. Soon after, she bought another near-bankrupt nursing registry called 24 Hour Medical Staffing LLC and turned it around. She also hired the original owners of the company and mentored them.

“I feel really elated seeing all these things happening,” Stone said.

Stone says she enjoys a challenge. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997, she said she treated the disease the same as the business hurdles she’s faced.

“When I was told I had cancer my family was devastated,” Stone said. “But I told them we should accept what is and live with it.”

Stone, who’s married and has a blended family of five children, said she had to slow down and take a leave of absence from the office to tend to her health. But she continued to run the business from home.

After all, she said, “My brain was not dead. It’s better than worrying about what’s going to happen.”

Stone’s strong will and persistence is said to “amaze” and inspire employees. She said she has become a role model to individuals who used to give up on things easily.

“Every time they feel they’re getting bored I just tell them, ‘You’re just lazy. Pick up the pieces and move,'” Stone said.

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