When manypeople her age would be relaxing in sunny climes, this 72-year-old commands her own Loudoun County technology firm called Unanet, which creates specialized computer applications for companies that work for the government.
Unanet sells Web-based products, such as employee time sheets, expense reports and time management programs that make it easier for a business to bill the government. In other words, all those boring but important things you need to be a contractor.
Her clients include defense giant General Dynamics, pet food maker Blue Buffalo, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Woods Hole Research Center, cybersecurity firm Telos, and K12, which is a Herndon-based online home education company.
Craig is chief executive of Unanet, which grosses nearly $20 million a year in revenue. She is responsible for more than 70 employees serving more than 1,000 customers.
You don’t find many people like her in cloud computing, competing with the young Silicon Valley turks who built companies such as Workday and NetSuite.
Where competitors raised tens of millions of dollars from venture capitalists, Craig owns most of her company. She built it the old-fashioned way, mortgaging her Fairfax County home for $250,000 to cover a business loan.
“All these young studs get venture capital, but we are building a business to last,” said Craig, who owns 65 percent of the company. Employees own the rest.
The business is built on two revenue models. The first allows customers to buy the software, put it on the computer and pay a “license fee” for every person who is using it.
The second revenue model is the recurring revenue stream, where customers pay a quarterly subscription fee to tap into Unanet’s cloud-based software.
Craig wouldn’t say how profitable the company is, but it makes enough so that the firm has zero debt. Employees earn anywhere from $50,000 to $300,000 a year, and they receive a 401(k) match and health benefits.
I was at first surprised that Craig was still running the company (her son is president and chief operating officer, and her daughter is responsible for making sure customers are happy), but it made more sense after she told me about herself.
Craig, who was born in Queens, graduated in 1964 with math honors from St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame, Ind., and got a job as a computer programmer at AT&T in the District. Her father had died and her mother needed some help with money.
“I was an early coder,” she said. But she said executive opportunities for women were limited at the time, and she left after a little more than two years.
“I thought I could do better elsewhere.”
She eventually ended up in the computer center at Carnegie Mellon University at Pittsburgh in 1971, where she started a women’s task force that brought in feminist pioneers such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.
“I felt women weren’t getting ahead and needed to understand how women could get ahead,” she said.
Craig left Carnegie Mellon and returned to Washington to work for another technology company. But she wanted to break out on her own.
“I decided I wanted to make more than just a salary,” Craig said. “I wanted to be a leader.”
She launched Computer Strategies out of her Fairfax County basement in 1988.
Computer Strategies’ mission was to help companies set up computers, manage their rudimentary e-mail services, and set up and service the internal network that helped these businesses, large and small, move their work into the digital age. The companies ranged from pharmaceutical giant Merck to telecommunications pioneer MCI.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” she said. “We were just kind of living on the edge.”
She learned how to sell, sitting at her desk, cold calling prospective clients for eight hours on end.
She hired too many full-timers, then cut back.
She figured it out.
The company chugged along until 1998, when it became solely a software product company. That means the firm basically created time sheets on the Web, a radical move that allowed clients to log in and fill out their time sheets.
“It was a game changer for us. People didn’t have everything on one package that was acceptable over the Web. ”
After the dot.com bust, the company, by then renamed Unanet, pivoted into serving government contractors. A big break came in 2004, when it beat out competitors to win a six-figure job with L3 Communications.
In the past 10 years, the company has grown revenue by about 20 percent a year. Its latest cloud subscription product is growing faster than that.
I asked Craig to tell me some of the lessons she has learned as a business owner for almost three decades.
Her first response was immediate and crisp: “Always keep over 50 percent of the business under your control,” she said. “In my first company, I did not have this. Fortunately, my partner and I agreed to split amicably.”
She also recommended:
●Don’t be too quick to hire someone as a salaried employee.
“Let them be an independent contractor. This way, if things are tight, you’re not worsening the situation with the added liability of paying salary. I employed too many people as salaried who were not well-utilized in my first company, and we had serious financial problems.”
●Sales are most important. Networking goes along with this. Always get names and build your Rolodex. Then keep in touch with those people.
“Hire people to do the operational tasks so that you have more time to sell. We used to hire junior sales people. I changed that in 2010 and hired more experienced, and, yes, more costly sales people. It is worth it.”
●Eliminate performance reviews.
“We have no performance reviews. We have people development interviews on a quarterly basis.”
“Early in my career at Carnegie Mellon, I developed and executed a numbering system for performance reviews. The men always said they deserved better. The women said they would work better!”
●Encourage collaboration.
●Encourage innovation.
●Develop several alternatives to problems, not just one.
●Make sure everyone has a voice in meetings, even by prompting the ones who hold back.
I admire people like Craig who continue to be productive and perform the essential but unglamorous task of building businesses that employ people at good wages.
Craig said she has no interest in selling her company and cashing out.
“I love working. I love dealing with people, . . . seeing people using your product to make their business better,” said Craig, who chairs the company’s five-person board of directors.
Even at 72, she has her work-life balance going. She scheduled her interview with me around her Wednesday golf game. She owns a place in Umbria, Italy, and travels to Lake Tahoe in California’s Sierra Nevada, where she owns a home with her sister.
Life is good to Fran Craig.
She earned it.
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