THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 15, 1995 TAG: 9501120074
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover story
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 128 lines
GIAN PETERSEN noticed that women got paid the same as men in the South Korean army, unlike in civilian life. So she enlisted and served as a nurse for five years, rising to the rank of first lieutenant.
After moving to the United States with her American husband, she helped her family - mother, father and four younger siblings - come here, too. They didn't speak English. But her father had been a chef in Korea, so she opened a restaurant for them in Maryland. They eventually expanded to three restaurants to ward off outside competition.
In Hampton Roads as a single mother, she wanted to work in a travel agency, but no one would hire her. No experience. Thick accent. A woman. So she started her own agency and hired an experienced manager. His first task: teach her the business. She was the lone agent, delivery driver and accountant.
A decade later, Petersen operates two successful businesses: Atlas Travel Service, an agency with three offices catering mostly to corporate and government clients, and Atlas Technology Services, which seeks government contracts to provide temporary workers and services ranging from keeping track of nuts and bolts to cleaning overhauled ships.
She sent her son and daughter to local private schools and New England universities.
She's renovating a house on the Chesapeake Bay.
In recent months, she's been named one of 10 Hampton Roads 1994 Outstanding Professional Women of the Year and received the 1994 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Tidewater Regional Minority Purchasing Council, an organization that supports and promotes minority-managed businesses.
This year, Petersen hopes to really get things going.
I love it.''
Petersen is talking about her businesses but also her life, which are pretty much entertwined.
She and her family say she works all the time, if not in her office or zooming from appointment to appointment in her new white Audi then at home, where she helps design new parquet floors, raises flowers and knits bedspreads.
She's in motion even in play - she loves to listen to opera and read books, but she's also an avid downhill skier. ``She's excellent,'' said her daughter, Anina Petersen, who works with her. ``We call her `The Energizer.' She never falls down.''
GiAn Petersen - ``50-ish,'' she said - sits in a crowded office in the back of Atlas Travel, which shares a small strip shopping center on Shore Drive with auto parts, stained-glass and jewelry stores. She wears a black suit, sips coffee from a double-sized travel mug and answers the phone. A lot.
There are two clocks on the walls. That's no accident. Her children - son Jens Petersen also works with her - joke that she's too busy to turn her head to check the time. At home, she keeps televisions on in different rooms so she can move around doing things and still keep up with whatever she's watching. A fistful of speeding tickets testify to her usual state of being in a hurry.
She's got things to do. In 1995, she wants to devote 90 percent of her attention to expanding the ship-cleaning service of Atlas Technology into degreasing, removing hazardous waste and recycling shipyard waste.
As she did with her travel agency - selling it as an outside ``travel department'' for small companies - she's looking for a niche, providing a service that no one else has. That and hiring good people form her recipe for success.
``We look for the opportunities constantly,'' she said. ``Dirty work, we do.
``I've been working 10 years in the market. You cannot stay in the travel agency only. Too narrow. . . . You have to be flexible and jump from one thing to another.''
Petersen jumped from her native South Korea to Newport News in 1963 with an American Army officer husband. She already had questioned the sex-discriminating practices of her home country and taught her children that they could do anything they wanted, regardless of their gender.
After some years near her husband's family in Annapolis, Md., where she set up her family in restaurants - ``I created a Korean ghetto'' - and ran unsuccessfully for the City Council to get more involved in her community, she left her husband.
``Fourteen years married,'' she said. ``I grew so fast. I realized I married the nicest American man, American husband. I realized I couldn't stay the average American wife.''
About 1980 she was back in Hampton Roads, a single mom looking for work. She planned to stay only until her children were out of school but grew to like the city and now chooses to remain.
Getting a job was difficult. She found the business world to be mostly a white-men's club, which eventually led her to opening her own business. Typical Petersen, said those who know her.
``She has a quality in which she tends to go over or around obstacles,'' said Bernard Big, a longtime mentor and executive director of the Tidewater Regional Minority Purchasing Council. ``She has a persistent, resourceful attitude.''
``She has this attitude that anything's possible,'' said daughter Anina. ``If anyone says: `That's impossible,' she asks: `Why?' And they usually can't say.''
``I think she's very competent,'' said James A. Walker Jr., Norfolk city purchasing agent and president of the TRMPC. ``And confident, also. And very appreciative of the business she's gotten.''
She also helps out in the Korean community, dispensing business advice, loans and discount trips to Korea.
Petersen's next goal is to retire in a couple of years and offer free consulting to new entrepreneurs, young or old, to help them get started. Despite her difficulties getting started in business, she ran into people who helped her along her way. She wants to return the favor.
``That's my goal: I want to be a missionary in business,'' she said.
In the meantime she's trying to learn from her daughter how to chitchat at parties instead of talking business. She's trying to take some weekends off, too. But she also wants to help her son develop an environmental consulting business. And she's looking forward to helping raise any grandchildren that come along.
``You see the type of person you're talking to?'' Petersen asked with a broad smile. ``There's no stopping her.'' ILLUSTRATION: JOSEPH JOHN KOTLOWSKI/Staff color photos
GiAn Petersen opened Atlas Travel in Virginia Beach when no one
would hire her in an agency. Her business savvy also extends to
Atlas Technology Services, which seeks government contracts.
ABOVE: Petersen runs Atlas Travel with her children, Jens, left, and
Anina. Jens is the program manager and Anina is the marketing
director. LEFT: Petersen confers with Project Manager Don Dinovo,
center, andher son.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB