Jill Thomas, 33, is chief executive officer of a software company that expects to gross $1 million in revenues when this fiscal year ends–and anticipates grossing five times that the following year. If those expectations are met, it will be the first year the company has turned a profit since its founding in 1990. “One of the problems of having a software company is that you can’t get away with selling ‘vaporware,’ so your research and development costs are higher,” says Thomas, chief executive officer of Ion Systems of Crystal City, Missouri. The company produces electronic publishing software for online documents, such as corporate newsletters distributed through Local Area Networks (LANS) or Wide Area Networks (WANS). They also have developed a program called Designer that allows the creation of Internet and Intranet Web pages without using hypertext markup language (HTML).
Thomas was hired as the company’s first salesperson after its two male founders came up with the product idea. She liked the idea, but not the product. “I said, ‘Nope, I’m not selling this, it’s not good enough–but I can make it better,’” Thomas recalls. She started working with the company’s computer programmer and ended up in charge of all operations. In July 1992, she was named chief executive officer and (after an investment of her own money) owner. (She and her mother-in-law own 51 percent of the company.) Ion Systems now employs 15 at its Crystal City headquarters and operates field sales offices in several United States locations, Vancouver, Toronto, London, Belgium, and South Africa.
Rapid international growth posed language and legal issues for the company. “We spent more on legal counseling than most small companies do, but it has kept us out of trouble,” Thomas says. Through a referral from a business incubation center in Kansas City, Thomas hired an attorney willing to work on a retainer basis–or a monthly fee–for an initially reduced rate that increased as the company grew. That arrangement made it easy for company officers to call their attorney and ask for advice. “You need to be smart enough to know what you don’t know,” Thomas says.
Thomas is excited about the company’s future and the strategic alliances it has formed with large companies such as Innotech Multimedia Corp. of Toronto and Lotus Corp. “For a technology company, your product either solves an immediate problem, or it solves a problem that you recognize but that people don’t see. We had this product seven years ago. We realized that it would be very important for people to read information on-screen. But people don’t read information on-screen, they print it out, for a lot of ergonomic reasons. Ion changed the way people’s eyes interact on the screen. Our logo is an eye, to symbolize the visual impact of reading on-screen. And it’s a woman’s eye, because we’re a woman-owned and operated-company, and I wanted to put my touch on it.”
Time management, assertive communication, and creativity have helped her succeed in a typically male-dominated technology business, Thomas says. Her attitude can be summed up in the following statement: “You have to learn to separate ego from pride. Ego will kill you; pride will sustain you.”
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