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World of Business Doesn’t Faze Two Emigrants From World of Letters

Published in The Salt Lake Tribune

By Guy Boulton

One is a published poet; the other dreamed of writing novels. Neither thought that balance sheets would be as much a part of their lives as literature.

These days, Kathleen Reddy and Shauna Bona fret over cash flow and finding talented employees and all the other tasks that go into building a business.

The two woman and a third partner, Regina Davis, founded McKinnon-Mulherin Inc., a company that does communications consulting, technical writing, corporate training and Web-site design.

Their backgrounds may be atypical, but Reddy and Bona exemplify women who have struck out on their own after stints in the male-dominated world of large corporations.

From the start, they have benefited from a strong economy, the growing use of outside suppliers and changes in technology, which links them with clients throughout the country.

“You can communicate just as easily with someone a continent away, for a lot of things, as you could with someone down the hall,” says Hal Heaton, associate director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University.

The company's clients have included IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., Chubb Corp., Compaq Computer Corp., Ikon Office Solutions Inc., Intel Corp., Iomega Corp., Raytheon Co. and Texaco Inc.

McKinnon-Mulherin, started three years ago, now employs 12 people, including the owners. Five of those employees were added in 1999. And by all appearances, the company has a promising start. Still, you don't find many companies run by published poets—even Wallace Stevens didn't start an insurance company, he just worked for one.

Reddy, who has a master’s of fine arts from Columbia University, has had her poems published in Colorado Review, River Styx and other literary quarterlies.

Bona, an English major at the University of Utah, planned to earn her living as a reporter. She worked briefly for network, a now-defunct Utah publication focused on women's issues, before taking a job at Wasatch Education Systems, which develops multimedia courses.

There she met Reddy, and the two got their first lessons in how to design training programs. Working with people who had doctorates in learning theory, they became acquainted with software development, multimedia technology and Web-page design.

Bona and Reedy would later work together at Intel and at what is now Franklin Covey Co.

“Every time I changed jobs, I forced Shauna to go with me,” Reddy says.

They picked up skills with each job, such as managing people and running meetings. But growing weary of the management layers characteristic of a large company, they began to think they could work for themselves.

“We knew we had to build a good team,” Reddy says.

Still, starting their own company took some courage and a lot of homework.

They did research at the library on how to start a business. A bookkeeper told them what forms they needed to fill out. They used resources available through the Small Business Administration and its SCORE program. They learned about benefits. They took a class on how to read a balance sheet.

“We are English majors,” Reddy says. “This didn't come naturally to us.”

To save money, they worked out of their homes—their first major business expense was renting a laptop computer for a business trip. Within four months, they could afford an office and bought $100 desks and $20 chairs. “Never buy a $20 chair,” Bona says.

Contacts helped. They got subcontracts from a Franklin-Covey subsidiary, Shipley Associates. And they started getting work from Allen Communications, which develops multimedia training courses as well as software for designing courses, where Reddy knew people from her days at Wasatch Education Systems.

McKinnon-Mulherin—the name comes from the birth names of Reddy's and Bona's mothers—meshes consulting, writing and technology. The company employs writers as well as Web-page designers and a database programmer. Nowadays, a manual is as likely to be posted on a Web site as printed in a pamphlet, and a training program will be on a CD instead of in a stack of binders. More than half of the company's business is from computer-based training. The idea is to bring all the pieces together. But the most valuable piece may be consulting: helping clients understand what they need to accomplish and the most cost-efficient way to do it.

“We just don't write what they tell us to write,” Bona says. “We help them see how they can use that document for whatever goal they have. Sometimes people call you in to write a document and they don't need that document.” A 40-page manual often can be 10 pages, or a chart that sits next to computer.

They also understand technology. And Justice for All, a nonprofit coalition of groups that provide legal services for the poor and disabled, saw that when McKinnon-Mulherin wrote a proposal for a grant to set up an interactive Web site.

“Those guys understand that language, and they were sort of interpreters, translators, for us,” says Fraser Nelson, executive director of the Disability Law Center.

McKinnon-Mulherin, which does a project for a nonprofit organization once a year, also did the work at a reduced cost. “We never would have been able to get this expertise,” Nelson said.

The work, if nothing else, is varied.

The company has developed an online software guide for Hewlett Packard. It has developed an in-house training program for service representatives at a mutual-fund company. It has done an online training program for adjusters for a unit of Chubb.

“The people who like this are the kind of people who like to learn new things all the time,” Bona says. The variety of jobs adds to the company's skills—one of the advantages of using outside suppliers, says BYU's Heaton.

“You can learn from one company to help another,” Heaton says. “If you are inside a company, you don't get a broad perspective.”

The contracts can vary from one day to two months. The typical job generates $30,000 in sales. Last year, the company had sales of about $500,000.

That's a good start for a three-year-old company. But there still are the challenges of running and building a business—not the least of which is the age-old problem of managing cash flow.

“It can be kind of hand-to-mouth at times,” Reddy says.

Finding talented workers is another chore. So is learning how to prioritize tasks. And Bona and Reddy make less than half of what they did at Franklin-Covey.

But they are investing in the business, buying equipment and adding employees. There also are the benefits of working for themselves—deciding what work they want to do, deciding where to spend money and simply making the decisions.

That apparently offsets the challenges and headaches of owning a business.

“We are having a lot of fun,” Reddy says, “creating the kind of place we wanted to work.”