Despite the frustration of operating as a black woman in a male dominated business, Karen Kydd has built her Minneapolis marketing services company to nearly $3 million in revenues. But it took s lot of grueling work to get there.

Blood, sweat and tears of an entrepreneur
Dick Youngblood

Bystanders like me tend too often to romanticize the travails of the entrepreneur. That notion hit me between the eyes the other day when tears began tracking down Karen Kydd's cheeks as she recalled the 1989 start-up of her marketing services company.

The emotion apparently surprised her a much as it did me: " guess I haven't thought about it for awhile," said Kydd, 45 whose Minneapolis based Kydd Group focuses on direct-marketing promotions, event planning and management of corporate sponsorship programs. "But it was grueling, roll-up-your-sleeves, grinding kind of work."

She wasn't talking simply about the perpetual shortage of cash to hire staff. Or seven -day,100- hour workweeks, or even the necessity of sharing a home with three others for eight years.

There also were the frustrations, of laboring as a black woman in a white, male-dominated business. The bias rarely was blatant. " I'd set up an interview [with a prospective client] over the telephone," said Kydd, whose flat, Midwestern accent offers no hint of her heritage. "Then I'd see their eyes glaze over as I walked in and they'd become very, very polite." One local executive promised her a plum assignment, but never called back to nail down the details.

Not that she has a lot to feel sad about these days. Thanks to what MLT Vacations executive Kathy Jo Daley calls Kydd's "wonderful insight and intuition," the Kydd Group grew in 10 years to 1999 revenues of $2.6 million.

Rapid growth since '96
And because of a growing roster of assignments from such prominent out- of-town clients as General Motors and Miller Brewing, much of that growth has come just since 1996 when revenues were less than $800,000. All of which becomes more impressive with Kydd's admission that she had no idea how to start a business. "it's not like I had a vision or anything," said Kydd, who had spent several years as a Northwest Airlines marketing manager before tiring of life inside a big corporation. "But I'm detail- oriented, and I'm creative, so I figured I could do this."

She did it with the help of one of this area's important entrepreneur support groups: the Metropolitan Economic Development Association (MEDA), a private nonprofit organization that since 1971 has offered technical and managerial counseling to minority business people.

"MEDA has been at my side every step of the way," Kydd said. "They gave me the tools to succeed." Bill Bailey, MEDA's Loan assistance director, tossed the bouquet right back: "She's one of our stars," he said.

At first, Kydd's business mainly involved event planning, including an early extravaganza that found her transforming the floor of the Metrodome onto "The World of MLT Vacations" for a crowd of travel agents. The displays ranged from a Japanese rock garden to a Las Vegas casino, from a Caribbean island shaded by 20-foot palm trees to a lush Hawaiian landscape dominated by a 40-foot volcano that intermittently belched pyrotechnics

Understand the customer
Spectacular as that project was, however, Daley regards another assignment as an even better example of the Kydd Group's work: MLT inc. University. That is an education series that Kydd developed in 1994 to keep MLT'S retail clients abreast of the destinations available through the travel service.

The upshot: The program which has grown to involve more than 1,800 agents willing to pay their own way to attend has "definitely led to significant sales increases, " said Daley, MLT sales director.

The secret? "Karen and her people make it their business to understand both the wholesale and the retail side of the travel business," Daley said. "So they know how to implement [marketing] programs that get results."

Growth was slow, however, mostly because of a cash shortage that kept the staff small and confined to short-term project work. "We had to finish one project and collect our fee before we could go out and sell another project," Kydd said.

That constraint disappeared in 1997, however, when she was able to borrow 300,000 under Bailey's program, which underwrote 50 percent of the loan. That gave Kydd the resources to take on more long-term business without having to worry about the upfront funding.

More important, it allowed her to pursue a niche-what she calls "diversity marketing and corporate sponsorship" that has become the key to the Kydd Group's recent growth. It started with an assignment from General Motors' Pontiac/GMC division to help the automaker reach affluent blacks.

GM a major client
The result was a sponsorship affiliation with the National Brotherhood of Skiers, an association of 14,000 black skiers. Indeed, thanks to Kydd's work, Pontiac/GMC wound up as the largest sponsor of that group's youth programs. The automaker was so delighted with the result that the Kydd Group soon found itself with nearly 10 similar assignments to help Pontiac/GMC cement relationships with various market segments.

"Karen has a real commitment to excellence," said Reggie Armstrong, who was the division's merchandising manager until his recent assignment as an executive in General Motors ' e-commerce program. " Her through-put, follow-up and integrity are flawless and she hires people who meet those standards."

Apparently he passed the word because the Kydd Group now manages more than 40 Diversity sponsorship programs for various GM divisions. For Chevrolet, for example, Kydd helped plan promotion and product displays for a national Hispanic conference. And for Cadillac, she helped plan and promote the division's involvement with the NAACP's annual "Image Awards." For Miller Brewing, the Kydd Group also created and manages an award program for outstanding work by the nation's black press.

"This is where I see our growth," Kydd said. "More and more companies are looking for new ways beyond traditional advertising to influence various markets segments."

There are enough of them, in fact, so that Kydd already has contracts for upwards of $2 million worth of business this year.