COVER  STORY   
     

photo by Mark Rhodes Mary Ann Elliott briefs the brass at the Pentagon, where she has top-secret security clearance.

"It was my fifth merger in eight years," Elliott says. "I was tired of going through the process. It seemed every time it happened I practically had to start over. ... But I had learned the first buyout offer is always the best, so that's what I asked for." Elliott was hoping for the thickest possible cushion while she looked for a new job. But she had a few things working against her -- her lack of formal education and the fact that she was in a field dominated by men. She suspected those circumstances had raised red flags during previous reorganizations, slowing her ascent up the corporate ladder, at least initially. So her boldness with Contel was a pre-emptive strike.

Being bold doesn't make Elliott uncomfortable. Her friends, colleagues, employers and clients all agree that Elliott's tenacity, combined with intelligence and a genuine affection for people, has brought her from humble beginnings to a position that allows her to haggle with multinational corporations.

"Mary Ann has a tremendous amount of perseverance," says Newport News' Lou Shivars, regional sales manager for World Book when Elliott began selling encyclopedias part time, door-to-door in Hampton Roads in the late 1960s. "If she hadn't been so strong-willed, and I'm going to say 'aggressive,' then she would not be where she is today. But there are other reasons. She has strong religious faith, and she's loyal to her friends."

Contel sent Elliott home with the severance package she wanted, and she hit the streets. She'd been hearing more and more about Iridium, Motorola's proposed low-orbit satellite system for mobile communications, so she went back to see the company that had hired her in 1978 for her first job in wireless communications.

Motorola didn't agree to Elliott's terms for a full-time job as its head of policy and regulatory development. But the Illinois-based communications conglomerate offered her something better -- a contract that would enable her to start her own company. In January 1991, just a month before Contel and GTE concluded their deal creating one of largest telecommunications companies in history, Elliott filed the necessary paperwork to start one of the smallest: Arrowhead Space & Telecommunications Inc.

Arrowhead, a satellite communications company, has grown rapidly from a business Elliott ran out of her basement in Rockville, Md., to a bustling firm with more than 50 employees in a Falls Church office building. She moved her company and her home to Virginia in 1993 to be closer to the federal agencies she serves, particularly the Department of Defense.

This April, for the second consecutive year, the firm made Virginia Business' Fantastic 50 list of the fastest-growing, small, private companies in the commonwealth. It also was among Inc. magazine's 500 fastest-growing companies in the United States in 1998. Arrowhead's annual revenues have soared from $60,000 its first year to $6 million in 1998. Based on its backlog, the company projects it will gross $9 million in 2000.

Arrowhead is making substantial headway in acquiring nonmilitary government contracts, supplying such services as year 2000 plans, help-desk support and database administration. But 75 percent to 80 percent of its business still comes from the Department of Defense. Elliott has a top-secret security clearance, and she regularly confers with top U.S. military brass about their satellite and computer systems. Arrowhead set up satellite ground stations for NATO in Bosnia, and it edged out defense software giant Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego for portions of a contract to provide advanced planning for military communications for the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency.

"That one," Elliott says, "we are especially proud of."

* * *

To say Mary Ann Elliott has come a long way is an understatement. An only child, she was born 56 years ago in Robeson County, N.C. -- historically one of the poorest localities in the Tarheel state.

Her mother, Mary Caroline McKenzie, was Scotch-Irish. Her father, William Austin Edwards, was half Tuscarora Indian on his mother's side. It was enough to label the family as American Indian at a time when such lineage was likely to evoke shame and ridicule.

"Mary Ann came in on the tail end of the sharecropping era," says Elisha Locklear, current cultural chief of the Tuscarora tribe. "Back then, it wasn't as fashionable to be an Indian. White people would spit on us during the day, and then try to bed down with our women at night. A lot of us managed to survive by hiding out in the swamps." Nearly everybody in the region was still tied to the land. The only cash came from cotton and tobacco, economic mainstays that linger today.

Elliott remembers having a couple of dolls when she was a child, but she does not remember playing. By the time she was 3, she was working in the tobacco fields, riding on a mule-drawn sled and using a gourd to dip water from a bucket for thirsty workers. At 7, she had become a "stringer," honored at that early age with the responsibility of tying together the sticky tobacco leaves that would later hang in a curing barn.

During her childhood, Elliott's family moved back and forth between North Carolina and Hampton Roads, eventually settling in Newport News. After Mary Ann entered the first grade, she would return every summer to the family farm, managed by her uncle, to help with the tobacco harvest.

"My father's mother, whom we called Miss Annie, always said to us, 'Make yourself useful, child.' And we sure did," Elliott says. "I learned two things back then for sure: I learned about hard work, and I learned I didn't want to be a farmer's wife."

But life in Newport News provided no relief from toil. Elliott's father, known as "Pud" because of his fondness for pudding, operated a roadside stand called "Pud's Market" at the corner of Pembroke Avenue and Pine Street in Hampton. He put his daughter to work selling produce before she was big enough to see over the counter. Elliott stood on three wooden soft drink crates, pulling the handle of a mechanical adding machine to total the purchases. She learned about people and the art of selling from her dad, who sometimes took her on buying trips to vegetable farms along the Eastern Seaboard. Her training was cut short, though, when Pud Edwards suffered a stroke that left him in need of round-the-clock care.

Elliott was 11. Her mother was working nights as a private-duty nurse for Hampton Roads hospitals, and the two traded shifts each day as care givers. Elliott came home from school to be alone with her father until she left for school the next morning. "By the time I'd done that for a while," she recalls, "I had lost any vestiges of childhood or innocence left in me."

So when James Ray Elliott came along a few years later, young Mary Ann Edwards was eager for a way out. "He was gallant, gracious, and he had a brand new car. He also was brilliant, and his brilliance attracted me as much as anything else." She dropped out of the eighth grade at Newport News High School, and they got married.

Elliott had her first child, J.R., in 1957, just before she turned 15, and for the next two decades she was a housewife. She bore two more children, Daniel and Sharon. Elliott returned to Newport News High to get her GED in the school's adult education program, and she began selling encyclopedias to homemakers like herself.

Her husband applied his brilliance to a career as a nuclear inspector at Newport News Shipbuilding. Her son, Daniel, would grow up to become her director of operations at Arrowhead Space & Telecommunications, but that was a lifetime later.

* * *

Elliott's own career might never have progressed beyond World Book. But James Elliott died in a car crash in 1975, and his 32-year-old widow soon realized that selling encyclopedias part time wasn't enough to keep the family afloat.

After an uninspiring stint in real estate, Elliott went back to World Book full time and became a sales manager. Then she was excited to learn from a World Book co-worker that the up-and-coming two-way radio company, Motorola, was starting to hire women. She applied for a job but was turned down.

"When I get mad, I can really write prose, so I wrote a letter to the chairman of the company," Elliott says.

Motorola Chairman Robert W. Galvin, son of the company founder, passed that letter down to Frank Todd, mid-Atlantic area vice president. Todd went to take another look at this feisty young woman.

"There were still a few people at Motorola who thought that women couldn't sell technical products," Todd says, "but officially Motorola was taking a very strong EEOC position and was interested in hiring more minorities and women. I went down and interviewed her. We decided to hire her, so you can say Motorola was instrumental in getting her started. But her ability took her from there to where she is today."

Within a year, Elliott was top salesperson in the region for Motorola's "terrestrial wireless division." She was selling two-way radios to taxi companies, construction firms, ambulance services and law-enforcement agencies. Word got around, and eventually reached Cliff Barker, founder of a local company called Navidyne, which was marketing satellite navigational and communications hardware to commercial shippers.

The two met in 1980, and Barker soon put Elliott on his staff. "She did a tremendous job in sales," Barker says. "She learned the technical side of the business very quickly and already had the energy, enthusiasm and people skills she needed. She helped make the company's success, and it gave her the background in satellite communications that helped her continue to succeed later."

During her four years at Navidyne, Elliott fell in love with satellite communications. She traveled across Europe teaching customers how to install and use the technology. There were only about half a dozen commercial communications satellites in orbit back then, and Elliott says sales were tough to make. "People didn't even know what we were selling."

Eventually Sperry Marine acquired Navidyne. And in 1986, Elliott moved on to a Dallas company called Talon Technology, which specialized in high-speed data transfers over satellite networks and satellite-based telecommunications for the oil and gas industries.

One person she sold systems to was Shell Oil's Larry Whigham, who supervised the group that supplied instrumentation for Shell's geophysical research. Talon provided satellite connections that allowed Shell's seismic boats to send data instantly back to Houston for analysis. Whigham had known Elliott since her Navidyne days and says her knowledge of satellite communications was already vast by then.

"But that's not what I remember best," he says. "It was back in the run-and-gun days of the oil industry. We worked hard and we played hard. I remember once we were at a meeting in New Orleans of the National Ocean Industries Association, and Mary Ann decided we should all go to a concert together. She insisted that we call my wife and have her fly over from Texas to be with us. She wanted everyone to be together and happy."

Elliott's next move was to Comsat, creator of a satellite network that transformed the telecommunications industry. She worked for Comsat International in Dallas and Houston until that division was bought by Contel, which in 1988 moved her to the D.C. area to work on government contracts.

By then Elliott's mother, still living in Hampton Roads, had become very ill. And Elliott was glad to be closer to her childhood home. When Contel announced the proposed merger with GTE and she faced the possibility of another relocation, Elliott was ready to consider self-employment.

* * *

Elliott's launch of a new defense firm was audacious for more than one reason. Not only is defense contracting dominated by men, it's dominated by former military officers and engineers who know the system and have long-standing connections well before they strike out on their own. Plus, it meant she would have to cross swords with companies like Lockheed Martin, Defense General and Science Applications International.

Her friends say it was her kind of challenge. "When Mary Ann went to work for Motorola, she wasn't about to let the old boy network get her down," says Joseph Gately Jr., whose firm, Gately Communications Cos., was responsible for installing and maintaining the Motorola radios Elliott sold in the late 1970s. "To see her today, you'd realize she's really doing the same thing ... she did back then. She's just a genius with people."

Elliott named the company Arrow-head partly as a tribute to her American Indian heritage. She began to research her background in 1965 to determine whether some family health problems were genetic. Once she began looking, her interest in native cultures had been stoked. From then on, Elliott nurtured closer ties to her tribe, but she didn't get her tribal certificate until years later when she thought the document would help her get certification as a minority contractor.

"Mary Ann's no fool. When I heard she'd started her own company in D.C., I thought it was about time," Whigham says. "She's always been more motivated than her bosses, and I'm sure that intimidated them. ... So I thought the best thing for her to do was work for herself. She's such a hard worker, I'd hate to have to hold a light for her."

Others are quick to emphasize that Elliott's people skills come from the heart. Arrowhead recently has undertaken efforts to attract telecommunications businesses to Robeson County, N.C., in hopes of providing jobs to replace those lost in cotton and tobacco. Elliott has been working with economic development officials in the region. She also has made several gifts to the Tuscarora tribal office and established an academic scholarship in her mother's name at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

"Despite her success, Mary Ann has never lost her sense of humanity, her sense of caring," says Anne Redmond, a World Book colleague who has remained friends with Elliott through the years. "When my daughter was dying of breast cancer, she called me every single week, without fail. It didn't matter where she was. She called me from the airport in San Francisco. She called me from her hotel room in Europe."

People skills and technological expertise are a rare combination in the defense industry, so when Elliott talks, the armed forces listen. Defense Daily magazine last year picked her as one of the 40 most influential people involved in defense, aerospace and national security. She and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were the only women who earned the distinction.

"I really don't think I've done anything so spectacular," Elliott says. "I just tried to work hard and make a good life for my family. I remember when I was growing up, whenever I would say to my mother, 'I can't do that,' she would invariably reply, 'Can't never did anything. Can't never did even try.' You hear that enough times, you eventually start saying it to yourself. So, I guess that's why I've succeeded."

© JULY 1999, Media General Business Publications Inc.,
publisher of Virginia Business Magazine