In the thirty one years that Mike Hostage spent as an organization employee, he rocketed to the top of corporate America, first as the executive vice president and "de facto chief operating officer" of the Marriott Corporation, then as chairman of the Continental Baking Company, a division of ITT, and then in 1982 as chairman of the Howard Johnson Company. Hostage's parachute monies from Howard Johnson, coupled with his family's desire to stay in the Boston area, led him to become sensitive to the opportunities for small businesses.
Throughout his career, Mike Hostage had "always looked at entrepreneurs and wondered if I could have been successful at what they were doing." When he left Howard Johnson, he rented an office, realizing as many emerging portable executives have, that "nothing was going to happen unless I made it happen." Over the next year, Hostage, who has ten children with his wife Dot, began to look at a variety of business options with the definite idea that he would go into business with at least some of his children.
Four businesses eventually evolved from Mike Hostage's entrepreneurial spirit. Today, with one of his sons in Boston, he runs Hamilton American Speedy Printing, which is a franchise of a second company Hostage owns, the New England Franchise Corporation, the master franchisor for American Speedy Printing in New England and New York State. Hostage also owns a check cashing company, TYD, Inc. (for "Thank You Dad!") with another son in Washington, D.C., as well as a commercial nursery in Florida with his sister.
During those few tense years, Hostage experienced his share of sleepless nights, but at the height of one problem in particular, he made a decision that became an organizing principle for all of his businesses and helped solve the initial problems with one in particular:
I resolved that if anything was going to go under, it would go under because someone else took it away from me and not because I gave it up. I resolved that I was not going to my grave thinking I had quit something that in another month or six months or with another bright idea might have been fixed. Once I made the decision that I wasn't going to quit, it narrowed the range of things I needed to worry about
Mike Hostage also realized during this period that his "big business hands off mode" of running a business was not appropriate. Today, Hostage says that he would find it difficult to go back to work for a large organization, but that if he ever did, "I would manage it on a hands on basis the way you do a small company and probably do a better job of it."
Multiple Applications of Core Skills:
Marketing communications portable executive Dusty Bricker has carved out a niche for herself putting together world class events, corporate promotions, and sponsorships on a senior management level. Earlier in her career, she moved from one corporation to the next, creating new programs from scratch, or launching promotional events.
After Bricker returned from Hong Kong, where she created a target media business for the international group of Time magazine, she stayed with the company as a consultant to the publisher of Fortune, putting together issue oriented conferences. After two and half years, she had positioned herself to work with CEOs and senior management and had developed an excellent network of contacts.
Though Bricker went about building her business around her core expertise in staging world class events, she did realize that "there are just so many world class events, and that may or may not pay the rent, so there has to be some flexibility toward other areas of bringing in revenue." Her solution was to balance her business with other standard public relations and marketing consulting services until the day comes when she has built her reputation and can say, "I am only going to do world class events." The key to Bricker's success has been her ability to recognize that what she did for one company as an employee she could offer to multiple clients as a portable executive.
