The sisters’ secret weapons

Someone once told me that the more partners you have in a business, the less chance you have of success. I’ve also been told that doing business with friends or family is a recipe for disaster. And of course it’s widely believed that women can’t succeed in contracting.

So how do you explain the success of Seven Sisters Inc., my sisters’ electrical contracting firm in northeast Washington state? How have we survived for 20 years, supporting some three dozen employees and generating annual revenues as high as $7 million?

It turns out that, for all the odds against us, we enjoyed a few secret weapons in our arsenal. In a cyclical industry that’s vulnerable to the ups and downs of the economy, our chemistry and our family unity have allowed us to work our way through some hard times that other firms with less solid commitments might not have been able to negotiate.

My six sister-partners and I—now aged 35 to 50—grew up in the construction business and were raised to be independent and to believe we could do anything we wanted if we worked hard and smart enough. Since it never occurred to us that others might not think seven young women belonged in the electrical contracting business, 20 years ago we just went ahead and acquired an under-used electrical division that was being phased out by our father’s construction company, Snelson Inc. To be honest, we didn’t understand how difficult establishing a professional construction firm would be. We soon found out.

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Seven Sisters Inc. really is owned by the seven Snelson sisters. Each of us owns an equal share of the business and participates in its management, although only three of us actually work for the company. My sister Nancy Williams is president; she does the bidding and manages all the projects. I’m the company vice president and handle financial affairs. A third sister, Julie Snelson, handles job costing and the payroll. She joined us nine years ago, first on a temporary basis, then permanently after she found it was actually possible to get along with older sisters on a daily basis.

There are real advantages to working with someone with whom you grew up. For example, Nancy and I have enjoyed many years of tranquil compatibility. As business partners, we tend to agree on many important issues and often find we have reached the same conclusion before we even discuss the topic.

Of course there are some real drawbacks, too. Since we all grew up together, each of us knows the others’ “hot” buttons. And sometimes we may be less reticent about pushing those buttons than we might be with non-relatives. So after about five years we devised a simple rule: Business topics would be discussed only at the office. Family gatherings were declared off-limits to business talk.

At first, this was more difficult than it appeared. We’ve always been a close family that gets together often. When we were young, our father’s firm was one of the leading construction companies in its marketing area, so construction was always a topic of conversation. However, we have since learned that it’s much better to keep social events social.

While we weren’t new to construction or to business when we purchased the firm in 1980, we were new to the idea of ownership. Looking for independence, my sister Nancy took the helm of our newly purchased company in May 1981. She was well-versed in the construction business because she had been employed with Snelson since high school. In fact, she left her position there as equipment manager to fill her new job as president of Seven Sisters.

Nancy spent the first several years working closely with our estimator to learn the electrical business. She also took classes to expand her knowledge base. Learning the ropes took much of her time and energy, leaving a gap in management of the office staff. So I was asked to come aboard.

My first day at work revealed a disaster. The accounting was in a shambles, billings were backed up and the bank account hadn’t been balanced for months. The one bright spot was that there was cash in the bank.

The state of the books resulted from a classic business problem. Nancy was so overworked that there simply wasn’t enough time in the day to perform all the tasks that needed doing. But that was really the only problem. Once I realized that, I was convinced that we had a future. And once I took charge of financial matters, Nancy could focus her energies on the part of the business she knew and enjoyed: bidding and managing work. Our mutual ability to allow the other to work independently has been a real source of strength for our company.

We had another secret weapon: our unique company name. “Seven Sisters” has been an excellent marketing tool. It makes us stand out in the contracting business, where a company’s identity is critically important. Just mentioning our name is a great conversation-starter. “Are you really electrical contractors?” general contractors ask. “Are there really seven of you?” Once they hear our name, they’re unlikely to forget it—and that awareness is the first step toward landing a job.

Our first objective as a relatively new, struggling business was to assure our already established customers that they would continue to receive the same level of service (or even better) as in the past. But of course we wanted to expand our customer base. That’s when we discovered that we enjoyed yet another secret weapon: the state and federal requirements that government must set aside contracts for women-owned and minority-owned companies in proportion to their percentage in the general population. Our father gets the credit for suggesting we set up the company as a totally women-owned enterprise for precisely that reason.

Of course, some contractors who hired us didn’t really believe we could do the job; they hired us solely to fulfill their minority set-aside requirements. “I don’t care what you do,” one of them told Nancy. “We’ll just give you the money, and you can bake cookies.” Rather than react to this kind of macho sexism, we decided to demonstrate that we could provide a superior product. Once we secured a contract, we did everything possible to change “Have to hire you” into “Want to hire you.” But make no mistake: If it hadn’t been for set-asides, our company would have had a much harder time breaking into the public work sector.

We got our first public project in 1982, when we wired a bus garage for the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle (or Metro, for short). The project nearly ended our short life as Seven Sisters Inc. Our estimate was wrong in some critical areas, and we exceeded the budget by 50%. Yet that near-disaster turned out to be a blessing in the long run. We had messed up, but we didn’t make excuses. We finished the job and made sure that all our suppliers got paid, however slowly. We not only survived our losses but also established a long working relationship with Metro as well as a reputation for hanging tough and keeping our commitments.

After the Metro bus garage was finished, Nancy and I discussed strategies for recouping our losses. The first idea was for Metro to give each sister a free lifetime bus pass. The second was to design a chart depicting our losses as well as new income from future completed projects to determine if we’d ever break even. We opted for the second idea, and I’m happy to report that we finally turned a profit with Metro after six years. More important to us is the fact that we’re no longer hired by general contractors simply because we’re women. Today, we’re hired because we stand among the best at our trade.

 

Christine M. Thompson is vice president and owner of Seven Sisters Inc., a commercial and industrial electrical contracting firm in Sedro-Woolley, Wash.

 

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