THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 25, 1996 TAG: 9603230416
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 135 lines
Dona Gallup and Doreen Fentress know their story sounds corny sometimes, or overly ``American Dream'', but its their story and that's how they see it.
The short version: the two sisters run Quality Technical Services in Virginia Beach, a 10-person firm that helps companies restructure, trains downsized military workers to get civilian jobs, and is now managing the move of 5,000 Internal Revenue Service employees from downtown Washington to suburban Maryland.
The longer, better story:
Gallup and Fentress were introduced to the business world early. Their father, a Filipino who joined the Navy in the 1940s and landed in Norfolk, opened in the mid-1950s some of the first coin-operated laundries on the East Coast.
While he worked for more than 20 years as a Navy steward - attending to the needs of military higher ups - he and the family built the laundry business into a mini-empire that let their father eventually turn down a Navy promotion and live off the business.
Hipolito Labre Pablo, their father, and Anna L. Pablo, their mother, had to work hard for everything they got. But when their father died more than two decades ago, hard work had gotten the Pablos what they wanted - a secure life.
``I remember one night at dinner,'' Gallup recalled, ``he said, `You know what's really amazing, girls, and shows you what's great about this country? Your father now makes more than the president of the United States.' ''
Technically speaking, coin laundries have nothing to do with Virginia Beach-based Quality Technical Services, the corporate training and architectural design firm Gallup founded in 1980.
But nearly every value Gallup and Fentress use to run the business is rooted in their upbringing as daughters of an entrepreneur.
``We had laundromats all over,'' Fentress says. ``We had to run around and maintain them in high school. I tell you what, it gave you big arms in high school because I had to lift all those quarter bags and nickel bags.''
One time while hauling money around, the teenaged Fentress was pulled over by police and told to assume the spread-eagle position because they thought she was robbing one of the laundries.
These days, sometimes, it's the male-dominated construction industry executives who don't believe Fentress can do the job. Some do a double-take when she strides into a project meeting carrying floor plans in ``a big black tube that looks like a bazooka,'' sporting a hard hat and steel-tipped boots.
``I've made it my business to understand construction, to understand electrical, to understand co-ax cable,'' she says. ``Sometimes with construction a male-oriented business, you walk in and they say, `Here comes the fluff.' ''
The two sisters got an early schooling in construction, because as the laundry business grew the family set up a small construction company so they could build their own businesses.
Although Fentress just joined her sister's business last year, the two say they became inseparable when they had to run the laundries after their father died when Gallup was 21 and Fentress, 16.
And since they are their family's third generation of Asian businesswomen, Gallup says there was little doubt how the closeness of the two sisters would manifest itself.
``There was never any doubt, at least in my mind, that I would own a business and there was never any doubt that we'd work together,'' Gallup says.
Though it's just 10 people, Quality Technical Services offers an array of services. Gallup specializes in leadership training, including segments in process re-engineering (total quality management and such), team and diversity training, and the company offers training materials such as workbooks, video, audio and multimedia.
She has even exploited a ``small, little niche'' in helping people who lost their jobs through military downsizing. It's called ``neurolinguistic programming,'' which means that Gallup teaches a person preparing for a job interview how to use certain cues to make the interviewer comfortable.
``It has to do with the intangible,'' Gallup says, ``but we're now to the point where they're very understandable, very usable. It's not the sort of hocus pocus people have described in the past.''
On the architectural and interior design side, the firm will design a workspace, buy the furnishings for it or ``re-engineer'' an office - in other words, find room for 200 people where there used to be 175 workers.
The two-year IRS project, for which QTS is the head subcontractor, involves planning the interior layout for three nine-story buildings. In order to meet the deadline, Fentress has to see that 175-200 work stations are set up every two weeks. Her advance planning gets down to even the minute details, including how to readjust the construction if a snow storm throws off the schedule.
Before joining her sister's firm, Fentress worked on the renovation of the Newport News Daily Press in the 1980s when that company wanted to spruce things up to help sell the paper. More recently, she's worked on combining the headquarters of the Hechinger and HQ hardware chains in the Washington area.
Gallup just recently worked with the Coast Guard in emergency preparation for oil spills. She's also provided leadership training for the full chain of command for the Portsmouth Police Department and the Tulsa, Okla., police force, including the honing of their hostage negotiation skills and instructing them how to deal with juvenile crime.
``We laughingly say, `We do everything but brain surgery and if you give us a little time, we could try to tackle that too,' '' Gallup says.
In May 1994, a time when many businesses were trying to move away from federal contracting, Quality Technical Services became part of the government's 8(a) minority contractor program.
Sonalysts Inc., a federal contractor, signed up Quality Technical Services as its protege for the program. In return, QTS has helped Sonalysts learn the ropes of private sector contracting.
``They're doing very well in the federal sector,'' says Sonalysts's Dave Storey, who met Gallup and encouraged her to join the program. ``I would even say they're one of the highlights of the Richmond (small business administration) office.''
Quality Technical Services entered the SBA program for minority contractors because Gallup ran into financial trouble after a divorce. Gallup's not too proud to admit that the program has righted the company's course.
``If you know you need help, don't be afraid to go out there and find it,'' Gallup says. ``All of us can hit a situation in our lives when you have to take a deep breath, swallow and ask for help.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color cover photo by Vicki Cronis<
Doreen Fentress
Color photo
Dona Gallup, above left with her sister and business partner Doreen
Fentress, right.
SIDE BAR
Company Profile
Name: Quality Technical Service: Location Virginia Beach
[for complete text, see microfilm.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE
by CNB