Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

An Interview with Mary MacPherson, Founder, M2Works LLC
July 10, 2006

Mary MacPherson is one of the best known veterans of the Washington tech community. Her role in the region has been helping start-up companies make it. She worked for Mario Morino, one of the icons of the local tech community, directing his Netpreneur program, and in marketing for MCI and most recently Blackboard. Now after so many years of helping others launch their businesses, MacPherson is trying her hand at entrepreneurship. She launched a consulting firm in 2004 and runs it out of her home in Reston. MacPherson grew up in Nyack, N.Y., and came to the Washington region in the early 1970s after graduating from Mary Washington College in 1971.

Tania Anderson, for Bisnow on Business: What story will you tell your grandchildren about the tech boom?
There was a KPMG regional awards dinner where the big winner was usually an individual. But in 1999 Netpreneur won it. There were 8 or 10 of us on the team. It was a black tie thing. Usually Mario or I would go up to get the award. But we thought it was really about the team. So we decided the team was going to do it. We wore black tie and jeans. I’m so buttoned up and conservative so for me to show up in jeans was something. It was about the time and the network and the team and just being at the center of so much of what was going on and having, through the generosity of Mario, jobs that focused on figuring out how to help people. That was a moment.

Do you still keep in touch with Mario?
Yes. Once you’re in the family, you’re in the family.

What’s the best lesson you learned from him?
What I really learned from him was just the power of networks . They have to be built with trust and integrity to be really effective. The world is a series of these ecosystems and networks and it’s really important to understand and respect the components of the ones that you’re in. The other thing that I learned from him is if you become so singularly focused on getting from one place to the other without looking around and understanding what’s going on, the end result will not be as great.

You were named by Washingtonian magazine as one of the most powerful women in Washington in 2001. What was that like?
I was so proud and gratified. They hosted a luncheon for the women. To be in that company was daunting and inspiring. It was a moment that I’m hugely proud of but it’s also a little dated to put that on my CV so I need to do something to get myself out there again.

So what are you doing these days?
I’m building a consulting practice with a focus on regional economic development and the role of entrepreneurship. I’m taking what I learned about building an entrepreneurial network in greater Washington and applying that to other areas in the country.

Who are your clients?
New Economy Strategies. The firm was one of three that were awarded a large Department of Labor contract that’s called WIRED or Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development. Almost 100 regions submitted proposals to win $15 million grants from the Labor Department to transform their regional economies, and in particular their workforce and economic development systems.

What regions are they helping?
We’re working in three of 13 regions. For example, Michigan is a region where the economy is transforming because the automotive industry is changing. You have a lot of talent, engineers, and others who have been working with their hands, but because of downsizing don’t have the jobs they planned on. They assumed they were going to be life-long jobs and would come with a pension and a retirement plan.

What’s your role?
I’m looking at Coastal Maine, Western Michigan, and the Finger Lakes region of New York. I’m also doing work in Maryland with the Technology Leadership Consortium. They are looking at informatics and its role in that region’s economy — informatics being the science of capturing, storing, retrieving, analyzing recorded data in a way that enables effective decision making. Because of the federal labs, the government and the universities, there are massive amounts of data in Maryland.

What inspired you to launch this type of consulting practice?
When I left Blackboard, I took some time off. I had never done that in between jobs. I went from MCI to Morino Institute in no time. When I went from the Morino Institute to Blackboard, I did the two things for a couple of months in parallel. When you don’t have to get up and go to work everyday and can think about what you want to do, I found my horizons were broadened. I did interview for a few things but I didn’t want that kind of job anymore. I had the good fortune of having some consulting projects land in my lap. I got a taste of what it might be like to do my own thing.

This is the first company you launched. Was it interesting being the entrepreneur, rather than dishing out the advice?
Coming from big name companies to now not really having a platform other than myself was different. Before when I was out in the community and I’d show up at an event and have my Netpreneur or Morino name tag on, right off the bat that was the orientation. Now I show up an event with the M2Works name tag on and, unless it’s someone that I know, it’s very different. I have to do my elevator pitch and make it relevant to the person I’m talking to. It’s been putting me into some realities that I know all entrepreneurs are in.

It’s just you right now. Do you have any plans to add employees?
I don’t want to be managing people right now. I want to be responsible to myself.

How do you define an entrepreneur?
It’s a person who can start and grow a company that will fuel a regional economy with jobs and revenue. That’s why regions should pay attention to entrepreneurs. If a region doesn’t have an entrepreneurial culture, college students who want to do something on their own will leave that area.

What does a region need to be entrepreneurial?
The challenge that all regions have is how do you connect and leverage and optimize your entrepreneurial assets? Do you have silos around entrepreneurship or do you have an ecosystem where an entrepreneur can see many ways to find other entrepreneurs, partners, markets, advisors, and money?

Can you be born an entrepreneur or is it learned?
Entrepreneurs have a spirit and a drive, a willingness to take risks, the ability to visualize an outcome that they want to go after. They have dreams and can imagine possibilities and impossibilities. You can learn skills to develop your business and your business skill. But there is an entrepreneurial essence that some people have and some people don’t. It’s very hard for someone to learn to take risks.

What mistakes are entrepreneurs making these days?
The world is flat and the world is much smaller than it’s ever been with technology. It’s very possible that just as we can be highly effective working at home, people can be effective working across vast geographical differences. Looking more globally at your business and the possibilities that global markets have for your business is something that all entrepreneurs should do.

How did the tech bust change the way this region is doing business?
The passage of time has given serial entrepreneurs their own lessons because they’ve started and built companies and sometimes it hasn’t worked. They’ve learned from their peers. The strength of the entrepreneurial network in this region is pretty good. Entrepreneurs are very open, sharing with other entrepreneurs what they know and what they don’t know. That interchange has strengthened the crop of new entrepreneurs.

You have a degree in American Studies. What did you want to do after college?
I got married before my senior year in college. I didn’t have a big, ‘I want to be a doctor or a lawyer’ plan. My husband was from Washington. We moved up here and we both went to work for this startup company. He passed away in 1997. We didn’t have any kids but I do have three godchildren and a niece and a nephew. I can take them places and do things with them and then take them home to their parents.

You belong to a few business groups focused on women, such as Women Angels and Women in Technology. Why are groups like these important?
Women in business need to belong to multiple groups. It’s important in one sense because women are your female peers. It’s going to feel comfortable talking to me about things you might not feel comfortable talking to a male peer about. But it’s important to have balance in your networking and not be all gender based.

Who do you look up to?
Personally my dad who passed a way a couple of years ago. He was a lawyer, and I learned ethics and loyalty from him. Professionally Mario has had a profound influence on me. Pretty much anybody who has worked for him is going to say that.

What got you interested in business and technology?
It was when I got out of college and moved here. The business my husband and I worked at in the early 70s was called the Washington Service Bureau. We were kind of your-man-in-Washington for law firms and corporate legal departments not in Washington. We would pick up legislation that had just been passed on the Hill and get copies of SEC filings, rulings from the FTC. There wasn’t a fax machine in those days. There was a telecopier where one page went in 6 minutes. At one point I ran an organization that had about 20 people in the public reference room at the SEC, getting tender offer documents for law firms. I learned a lot about how Washington worked and about information and service. When the company was sold, I went to work for a technology company that sold litigation support systems to corporate counsels and law firms. I didn’t know anything about technology but I knew a lot about the legal market. During this time I met the Macintosh. I immediately wanted to work for Apple. It’s the only time I’ve gotten a job this way: I opened the paper one day and there was an ad for a marketing manager for the federal systems group. I FedExed my resume and I had the job within a month.

What do you do in your free time?
Play golf, garden, cook, and I love to travel. I have a biking, hiking and canoeing trip coming up in the Czech Republic.

What’s the best and worst thing about this region?
The worst thing is the traffic. That’s a no brainer. The best thing is the diversity of the people, of the things to do, the restaurants...the abundance of the region.

[This interview conducted by Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business.]